Chris and I have known each other for over 15 years. Actually calculating the years was a bit scary. Chris' company sent him over to Melbourne for work, so while he's in Australia it would be an injustice not to meet up!
A short weekend break somewhere new is good, a short weekend break with lots of beer and food is even better. Meeting one of my really good friends, with beer, food and in a new place is awesome. Greeting each other with "awwright babe", "oi oi you schlaaaaga" or "where's the train to Catford mate?" aren't normal greetings. We're not normal people though, so it's alright. :)
A short weekend break somewhere new is good, a short weekend break with lots of beer and food is even better. Meeting one of my really good friends, with beer, food and in a new place is awesome. Greeting each other with "awwright babe", "oi oi you schlaaaaga" or "where's the train to Catford mate?" aren't normal greetings. We're not normal people though, so it's alright. :)
I arrived on Friday evening after the standard leaving-for-the-airport-a-bit-too-earlier-than-I-needed and so having to sit around waiting for my flight. To make things a bit worse, and presumably to make time go slower and make you spend more money in the airport shops (....mainly food and alcohol), I had no phone data coverage in the entire terminal. This meant that I couldn't surf the web on my phone while waiting. I had my laptop and even had trouble connecting to the airport's wireless network (although I did get a connection about 20 minutes before my flight). Oh and also, my flight was announced as being early...25 minutes early. Great news. Getting to the gate I was boarded in the 1st group as my seat was next to one of the emergency exits. Now to sit on the plane and check out any hot air stewardesses on this flight. Oh, but there's only a cabin crew of 4 and 2 of them are guys and one of them is a bit old. At least we get an early flight. Small mercies. 35 minutes later, the plane trundled up to the runway....10 minutes LATER than scheduled.
Landing in Melbourne with no major dramas, finding the Sky Bus bus stop and seeing a waiting Sky Bus for me to board and arranging to meet Chris at the station made me happier. Landing at Terminal 4 - Domestic Flights in Tullamarine airport was a bit surreal. Stepping off the plane takes you along the tarmac of the airport and then through a shed-like structure and then along a covered-walkway, to what seems to be the main terminal building. What you actually see is some portable-cabin toilets, and a small S shaped conveyor belt, and 2 padded turnstiles all contained within what was probably once a small car park. It seems the International travellers are such drama queens that demand air conditioned buildings and shops. Not the hardened locals.
I met up with Chris at the main terminus of the Sky Bus, just a short walk from his nearly-penthouse pad (85% penthouse or 17th floor out of 20 floors), which was pretty nice. It had a brilliant view over some of the Melbourne CBD and was in a cool location.
As Chris had been drinking already straight from work and I had 5 hours of drinking to catchup up, we headed out. The last time Chris and I saw each other was over a year ago, so we had a lot to catch up on. We immediately headed out for some food and drink. Probably due to our elevated moods and mission to chat, gossip and talk shit while eating a drinking, we choose quiet/trendy looking bar/restaurant (which in hindsight was quite a pretentious tourist trap bistro complete with unattentive table service, location-based pricing and a massive twat of a waiter attempting and failing humour and banter and refused to take part in most of our jokes).....our encounter with the waiter didn't start well with Chris' opening, vaguely racist question either..."So where you from mate?".....the guy looked a tiny bit Asian, was a bit fat and small, and had strange facial hair.
After our meal, beer and laughing so hard at stories of friends back home (a lot of it had to do with the Chris' infectious love for catch phrases too) we contemplated doing a runner from the restaurant until I actually found someone to give us the bill.
I was awoken in the night by lots of beeps from the surrounding seemingly 24-hour CBD and also from Chris stumbling to the bathroom and greeting me with "alright mate. I'm just gonna be sick" and then I could almost hear the squeaks and grating of him forcing bits of partially digested lumps of steak and chips down the plughole in the shower. [ ;) I couldn't really Chris, it's ok.]
Hungover on Saturday, after watching a lot of TV, we decided to go out, do some shopping, touristy things. We could still meet some birds even, although this was mainly due to the relaxed attitude to avian wildlife in a fast food chain.
More drinking beer, eating food and watching TV and then it was time to go out again. We walked around a bit. The streets seemed to be full of people, just as much as the day time, which was encouraging. A bit of drinking and checking out trendy bars (well....one....but that involved beer, rum, whiskies (Laphroig, Talisker and Jamesons) and some cocktails), we ended up in a place called Softbelly Bar. We talked to 2 girls. They turned out to be sisters (from a family of 11...one girl was 22, and the other looked in her late 20s), and from Penrith in Western Sydney. They were quite keen to chat to us, but soon seemed to change to very disinterested (maybe it seemed to me like they were a bit boring)...although the girl I was talking to was studying English something (Language I think) at uni in Sydney and so the normal questions followed; what do you want to do after your course? Do you like learning about English? Why do you enjoy it? What is your most favourite fact about the English language?! I find that this is a good format of question to ask people. She replied with one of my personal favourite facts of all time. I was so amazed that she actually told me this. Maybe the first time that anyone has ever said this fact to me! This is the fact (prepare to be amazed....): Why is beef called beef but comes from a cow, pork is called pork but comes from a pig, and chicken is called chicken, but comes from a chicken?
The answer dates back to Norman times (~12th century) when the English were ruled by the French. The poor English peasants used to toil each day in the fields and farms rearing luxury meats for the French aristocrats to eat. The extravagant, rich, epicurean, Frenchies would devour amplitudes of livestock flesh, leading to them saying "Je veux manger plus de cela, comment vous dites, le porc" ("I want to eat more of that, how you say, pork"....) and so the porc, or pork came about. The lower class English weren't aware of this word "porc" and so kept calling it pig. They didn't eat it, what did they care. It was only these hoity toity rich people. The same from beef (or "boeuf"). But chickens. We poor English peasants enjoyed a bit of landfowl. It was cheap and probably it was easier for the Norman farmers to kill a chicken and hide it behind a tree to eat later. It's more difficult to hide a dead pig or cow I presume. 
I also really wanted to use my favourite opening line that evening (favourite being a bit strong,...more 'so-shit-that-I-have-to-see-if-it-works'), but had missed the chance, so,...as a reward for hearing the girls highly interesting fact, she got my opening line; what's the best thing about a fat penguin?......no guesses? You don't know?....owwww ok then......Answer: it's a good ice breaker. She laughed which was good, but she laughed in a way that made me think that I shouldn't really use that sequence of words as an introduction again. At closing time, we walked with the girls to the main road were they caught a cab. We said our goodbyes and then Chris and I contemplated going to another bar. Being about 2am, there was hardly any places open serving alcohol. Even the hotel bar at Chris' place was closed.
Luckily there was a 7-11 open (a 24 hour 7-11...) and after a Chris made an expedition to the back of the shop, turned into being unluckily alcohol free. However, while Chris was walking around the shop I waited near the entrance. I felt this little arm wrap itself around half of me and a slurry, drunken, female voice talking to the shop keeper in the sort of middle aged flirty voice that reminded me of an Australian version of Jill from Alan Partridge saying "ohhhh he's gorgeouss!". Then she grabbed my other hand and held it out, and started to do a drunk waltz with me around the entrance to the shop. There was the crappy 2am-in-a-7-11 tinny pop music leaking out of the radio behind the counter and this lead her to shout that she wanted the music louder. Her wish was not fulfilled.
We tried to have a conversation, but alcohol had sealed our fates in that words could not be structured properly. Chris came over, took a picture of the scene, and one of her mates (holding a fist full of chocolate bars, talking about her kids and about how she could cut her hair just short enough to not look like a lesbian).
I think Chris wanted to leave the shop now. Another of their mates was just eating a big packet of crisps at the door. She hadn't paid. While they were trying to organise paying, we tried some more chatting, failed at anything constructive and wandered back to Chris' hotel. We found some more beers from earlier, drank them and watched Withnail and I until we passed out.
A friend of both of ours, Mark, lived in Melbourne for a while, where he met his wife, Laura. Sunday was quite nice weather for exploring, and despite being a bit hungover from the night before (but quite surprisingly not feeling that bad) we took a tram down St Kilda, where Mark and Laura used to live. It was lovely. We had the intention of finding the shop that Laura used to work in, and taking a picture of it. But we walked the wrong way down the road her shop was on, and near the end of the road realised that the numbers were descending, not ascending (we started at like number 60 and ended at number 18....) Sorry Laura. We took some pictures of the scenery though. :)
We also ate a bit and walked along the harbour and beach. This kid "doing a wheelie" was cool.
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