Melbourne Trip

I found it difficult to locate the centre of Melbourne. I have actually been driven through the heart of the city and travelled through the entire CBD without realising it. Broad streets and low warehouse sized buildings are everywhere which doesn't gel with what a Sydneysiders idea of a city centre is. Buildings should be ridiculously tall and the streets narrow, awkward and smelling interestingly of urine. Melbourne's occasional tall building stands out like an erect middle digit mocking my confusion. Standing on the 42nd floor of one of these middle digits the view of Melbourne stretches forever except for when you hit Port Phillip Bay. In that area Port Phillip Bay stretches forever. I think the main difference between Sydney and Melbourne is that in Melbourne the urban sprawl starts at the GPO.

One thing I noticed about Melbourne was that they didn't seem to have many pigeons or bats. In Sydney you can't move without tripping over these airborne plague carriers. Melbourne does have sparrows but its not really the same. Both Sydney and Melbourne have seagulls but that shouldn't surprise, seagulls turn up anywhere there is water. If you spat in the desert you would be surrounded by seagulls.

For the last few years it has been fashionable in Sydney to whine about our underutilized laneways and how vibrant Melbourne's laneways are by comparison. I think this is grossly unfair. Sydney's laneways are incredibly vibrant; they're full of people pissing, sleeping, throwing up, getting mugged, raped and occasionally having consensual sex with someone they met five minutes ago and won't remember five minutes hence. You can't get much more vibrant than that. I do understand the point though, in Melbourne you can do non self destructive things in laneways like have lunch and shop. On a medium to warm Summer's day lunch in a Melbourne laneway can be very pleasant indeed.

In between training more grist for my employers mill I wandered out to the tennis. Melbourne's trams are great, and they're free. At least they're free if you spend the entire journey trying to figure out how to work the ticket machine and then have to get off before you succeed. Rod Laver arena is the typical public event venue. There are many doors and it would be easy to get in if the place wasn't crammed with booths selling grotesquely overpriced and nauseating "food". Apparently the centre's catering was done by a cinema chain. The arena itself is pretty good though. The seating is arranged so that everyone has a view even if, like myself, they are quite high up in the stands. My view was awesome and so was the first match. Justine Henin was playing Elena Dementieva. Henin has come out of retirement and since she looks about twelve retirement was probably a little premature.

The match developed into a gruelling contest to see who could lose the most service games. Henin (who from the umpires pronunciation has two surplus consonants in a five letter name) proved slightly poorer at this game and wound up winning the first set. The second set followed the same pattern; Henin tried hard, twice heroically snatching defeat from the jaws of victory when serving for the match but Dementieva proved her resolve by losing the tie breaker and Henin reluctantly advanced to the next round.

The sound of racquet on ball was quieter than I expected but this was more than made up for by the sound of Dementieva. She howled, shrieked, moaned and gibbered; at one point I looked around to see if a hyena had wandered onto the court. Occasionally when Dementieva paused for breath I could hear a gentle gasp, this it turned out was Henin making her own noise in a quiet and understated way.

The match was fast and exciting and it was particularly enjoyable to watch it without commentary. It wasn't an unalloyed pleasure as various members of the crowd had little signs with comments like "shot" and "Yes, that was fast!" which sounded like the Channel 7 commentary team at their least inspired. It must be gratifying for them and the rest of the team at Banalities R Us to see their worthless observations preserved on non biodegradable materials to be waved for an hour and then dumped in landfill for centuries. This, too, is a form of immortality.

The second match was between Bernard Tomic and Marin Cilic. Compared with the women they looked like giants. Tomic is the latest Australian singles player to have lunatic expectations placed on him by the Australian public and particularly tennis commentators. Tomic won the first set but then I had to leave as I had to get up for work the next day. Tomic eventually lost in five his reason being that he had to stay up too late. At some point during the match it began to rain and I was able to watch the roof being closed. This took almost as long as the match as the roof moves with a speed normally associated with glaciers cutting a path to the sea.

PS there are no photos on this blog. Please feel free to draw pictures if that will help.