This is the interesting and exciting blog of Christop - one of the 84 000-or-so people of Ballarat.

Thursday, September 25, 2003

Tuesday night, about 8:20, I arrived at Spencer Street Station, in Melbourne, the world's most liveable city (but so is Vancouver). Melbourne also has the world's worst suicide statistics.
At the moment, Spencer Street Station is being redeveloped for the Commonwealth Games. It all looks very nice and it will be good to be able to travel between Ballarat or Bendigo and Melbourne in only an hour. But the redevelopment also means that I had to drag my suitcase all the way up a huge flight of steps.

Waiting the platform for the Belgrave train, I noticed that a lot of the other people had been at the Royal Melbourne Show. The girl sitting next to me was complaining to her boyfriend about how disappointing it had been. But what about the six different worlds?! I couldn't help but think.
If you are thinking of going, may I suggest you just go to the Dandenong Show - or some other local show - instead? It will cost you a lot less to get in, it won't be as crowded, and since you'll be probably expecting it to be not all that good, you'll be pleasantly surprised.

When I got off the Belgrave train, I went to the public telephone to call a taxi, because it was just starting to rain. However, I found that the phone there no longer takes coins - just phone cards.
So I started walking. The rain stopped. And then when I was about two-thirds of the way home it started pouring, worse than it has while I was outside in Ballarat during the just-past Winter. So I was completely saturated pretty quickly. The good thing was that I no longer had to worry about the rain coming back and me getting wet. Anyway, when I only had about ten minutes more to walk, Greg drove past in his land rover, picked me up and drove me the rest of the way to the house, where he's also staying at the moment.

This afternoon [well, yesterday] I went to visit an old friend. I walked about half an hour to their house, knocked on the door a few times, but no-one answered. Maybe my grandma just couldn't hear me.
So I walked to Knox City and did some shopping. Got some sunglasses and a t-shirt. The sunglasses are exactly the same as the last two pairs I bought. The first pair got sat on and broke. So I bought another pair. The second pair got sat on also. So I got Justin to turn the two sat-on pairs into one good pair. Which I eventually sat on also. But there were stillenough spare parts to repair the sunglasses, until these were also sat on.

Tonight [Wednesday still] James, Cookie, Wob and I had tea at La Porchetta in Boronia. Surprise surprise - Laz and his girlfriend were having tea there also. Laz said he thinks I should be in the next Star Wars film.