Melbourne Surprise

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Although part of my travel blog, this isn’t quite a travel blog blog. It’s closer to just my experience meeting up with various people in a place, that happened to be Melbourne. I didn’t really experience much of the city, but that was more/less the point of this trip. If you’re hoping to get some advice to insights into Melbourne travels, I probably wouldn’t go any further. This is more about a young male popping over to catch up with friends and family, and his social interactions.



My decision to visit Melbourne was mostly for a joke that was only really funny to me. A small group of friends have an ongoing messaging group, where we catch up on life, but mostly talk shit. About half the group live in Australia, and I occasionally fake-join into their plans, and get mostly ignored. The most recent time this happened, there was a mini reunion planned with Keshav visiting from Sydney, that I decided to secretly join in on.

One thing quite funny about this whole process was that Smiley’s wife Piru was trying to organise a Melbourne group dinner, and then have me join as well as a ‘surprise’, so there was a bit of subterfuge from her part. Now what transpired is that the guys there figured out that something was up, and the main guess was a pregnancy announcement in the group. It’s interesting how we’re at the stage of life where a Tuesday evening dinner event begets pregnancy news rather than the possibility that Jeremy Actually Visits.

In any case, thanks to Piru, Keshav and Milu for coordinating my visit, hosting my time there but also allowing me to pull off this (probably underwhelming) surprise. Hopefully I was as exciting as baby news. I’m actually quite pleased with the way it all turned out. Smiley was so unexpectant of my visit that he refused to answer the door because he thought it was salespeople. Eventually Piru tricked him into coming out, and his reaction was quite entertaining. We did something similar with Abhi when we popped over to his place, and he seemed equally surprised (which I’ll assume was positive).

It might come as no surprise, but Melbourne (Aus) is not so different to Auckland (NZ). which meant that when we were hanging out, it just felt that we were in some suburb in Auckland, catching up over drinks, brunch or walks. Abhi did make some lunch for me on arrival, and he said that he’d make some paneer if I give him more notice next time. The main difference is probably the scale of places available, which is hard to experience over a short trip. One trendy place that we managed to visit was a little patisserie, with the most expensive and decadent croissants that I’ve ever had. I also was able to run a game called “Mysterium” with the crew there at a local boardgame cafe, which I hoped helped get them more into playing games for our subsequent meetups.

In a stroke of good luck, one of my cousins in Melbourne, who had a baby earlier in the year, was organised the baby’s christening/baptism that week. It meant that not only was I able to meet up with my cousins there, but we managed to have a great mini reunion with the family who were visiting. Funnily enough, this was the 4th time that I met a particular cousin-in-law, the previous 3 times on 3 different continents (NA/Asia/Europe, and now Australasia)

Now the guys in Melbourne that drove my visit there are some of my longest running friendships. We’ve known each other since we were in Intermediate School, and more impressively, we have maintained a strong friendship since then. As always, the social connections have waxed and waned post high school, where we spent more/less time with each other depending on the year, and what was going on in our lives. It is harder now that we live in other cities, but I enjoy the camaraderie of our little online chat group. The topic of Roskill (our highschool) pride came up, with some disagreement over what it meant to have pride in our school days; I think overwhelmingly, those of us who would admit to being school proud were more focused on the social and cultural memories of the school, rather than the brick and mortar, or educational curriculum. I have been lucky enough to still have my closest friends in high school still be some of my closest friends now, regardless of stage of life of distance.

One downside to this is that there is a difference in the quality of conversations that we do have. A lot of people, myself included, would shy away from the usage of technology as a proxy for an intimate conversation. When I think about it, it seems to have pivoted a bit from our younger days where we were a bit more apprehensive about serious talks in real life, but our late night MSN conversation would cover all the realness in our lives. Ubiquity of social media today has somewhat split our generation in half, some of us living and breathing instant messaging, and the rest of us passively overwhelmed to the point that we indefinitely postpone talking to people whom we would normally have gone out of our way to connect to. I’m closer to the latter when it comes to my far-away friends, and it’s something I hope to get better at, since the technology is only as good as how you use it. I do need to keep more in touch with my cousins and family, my friends overseas (Alice, we need to line up our timezones), or just various cool people that I’ve met over the years around the world.

What was good about the Melbourne trip was that I felt like I could pick up on a dialogue with my friends as if it was ongoing, while still addressing the fact that we do need to make more of an effort to keep in touch, more than just the low quality, but good-for-ambience banter. This next bit sounds more dramatic than it actually is, so I apologise; but everyone is fighting their own battle internally. I think it’s good to take some time to check up on others around you. But also don’t feel too guilty if you’re working on yourself first or even if you weren’t aware that your friends were unknowingly going through a hard time, because both sharing, and checking in aren’t the easiest things to do (especially for males). Effort, and highsight realisations are probably the best outcomes in this situation.

The reason I’m writing bits and pieces of this in my travel blog is because it was part of my travel experience, and also leaving it as a reminder for me (and my friends) that we did have this little re-bonding experience, which is probably more memorable and relevant than a trip to the city centre, or miscellaneous sightseeing. Hopefully we can do more of these in the future, with more surprises, good news and fun events.

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