I am here in Melbourne, Australia for the first time, covering the Australian Open and experiencing a city, and a culture, that is quickly climbing up the list of my Happy Places. My impressions so far, which don’t include the koalas and the penguins I’ll meet later today on an Explore Australia tour, but just know that I intend to love them as long as they don’t give me chlamydia:
Melbourne is a little like London, if London enjoyed a Mediterranean climate. It’s a city where every independent coffee shop looks like it’s a going concern, where everyone’s within their rights to be mildly annoyed at you for veering right instead of left when you walk past them, but they’re so used to tourists from right-veering countries that they’re ready to juke if they need to. A place where people dress smartly, despite the heat, like they’re attending an afternoon wedding on the Cape in July. Even at the Open, which makes me happy I packed some dresses.
Everything is familiar but everything is just a little different and I’m not just talking about the way water swirls down the drain but that is admittedly part of it. There are high-street shops you don’t recognize, but there are high-street shops, so this city rings a bell. Like many of the world’s best places, there’s a problematic history of the colonized and the colonizers but this town is now defiantly proud and protective of an aboriginal heritage that goes back 65,000 years. You can offend someone without fear of ballistic reprisal because they have strict gun laws, but I don’t recommend it because they’re lovely people.