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By Kate, 21 April 2010 12:14 pm

The past week has been slightly difficult for me. Not because I’ve been stuck somewhere, but because of the possibility that I wouldn’t be able to go on my vacation. And I guess I shouldn’t really say ‘difficult’ because I’m not sitting in an airport waiting to see how long it’ll take to get a flight home. Those people have the right to claim difficult as well as various other things, probably involving a lot of cursing. But it’s been a battle of the voice of reason in my head and the voice that really just wants to see her friends after not being able to at Christmas because of another force of nature: snow.

Objectively, I sort of think this whole situation is a good one. Yes, it’s disruptive and annoying, and yes it’s going to take a while to clean up. But it’s forced people to look at the fact that shit they cannot control will happen, and they have to figure out a way to deal with it without just flipping out and acting like an entitled-to-everything 8-year-old spoiled brat who gets whatever she wants all the time.

It’s nature. It’s kind of the boss. When it says ‘jump’, you have no choice. And if we were a smart race, we’d look at this situation and say, perhaps we should have backup plans for things we don’t really expect to ever happen, and while I know a volcano has nothing to do with climate change, perhaps we should really start thinking about some of the effects which that, as an uncontrollable force of nature, might have and what we’ll have to do about it. Even if you for some reason don’t believe the climate is changing (I won’t go there in this post), it’s still worth a change in the way we handle things.

But my selfish inner voice is saying ‘GODDAMMIT! I realise I’m being unreasonable, but PLEASE, MS. VOLCANO, ERUPT IN A MORE DIFFERENT DIRECTION FOR ME. KTHNXBAI.’

I want to go to Dan and Kathleen’s wedding, and I want to go to the dive bar in Philly with Sara and Donnie and Liam and Bobby for pierogies and PBR, and I want to see my family and their beach house and Randle the dog, and I want to go to Dogfish Head with Lindsay and Dan, and I WANT MY MOTHERFUCKING VACATION.

I’m generally able to quell this voice of insanity, because I know it’s no use. Volcano will do what Volcano feels like, and humanity be damned. And really, more power to it. Volcanoes are freaking awesome, in the fullest sense of the word. Who am I to try to change the course of life, you know? Human frustrations are not top of the list for the cosmos in general.

In any case, they’ve lifted the flight ban now. Quite abruptly, but they’ve done it. I feel like we’re still not out of the water though, because of the immense backlog and the possibility that the volcano will decide to spew a whole lot more. Still, I’m now cautiously optimistic about my flights next week.

What irks me is that the first thing to happen is that the British media jumps on the government and the CAA and tries to blame them for the backups. It’s unbelievable! You get pissed when the government doesn’t do their job, then you get pissed when they DO do their job. What exactly do you want? It’s not anyone’s fault that this happened, it’s a VOLCANO. There’s nothing you or anyone can do about it, regardless of their rank or relative importance, so stop trying to find some kind of scapegoat. I think the government is doing quite an admirable job really.

And the CAA. You cannot get pissed at the CAA. It’s not like they were thinking ‘Hey, let’s inconvenience as many people as humanly possible just to see what happens!’ No. They were thinking, ‘Hey, we aren’t sure what the effect of this stuff will be on all these jet engines, so lets take them out of the air til we’re sure we won’t have people falling out of the sky willy-nilly!’ Sounds smart to me. I may have been upset if I couldn’t go on my trip, but I’d much rather be on the ground than plummeting to earth because all the engines on my plane failed after an airline decided that profit was more important than passenger safety. That’s why you NEED a CAA. Airlines can’t look at this situation objectively when so much money is involved, which is fair enough really, but people have to step back and let the safety people do their jobs.

I’m petrified of flying to begin with, so I’m more than happy to wait until the people who know their shit on the subject say they feel comfortable with going back up there. Risking your life for a trip to the beach just isn’t cool.

What people should really be complaining about is travel insurance that refuses to pay out, especially if they’re stuck abroad for another week because they can’t get on a flight home and have no money to pay for extra accommodation. Yes, a volcano is an act of god, but if you can’t count on your insurance to cover the unexpected, what exactly is the point in having it?

And they should also be complaining about other travel companies taking this as an opportunity to charge out the ass for rental cars, train tickets, ferries, and whathaveyou rather than trying to genuinely help people out. People are always quick to blame for the cause of something, but it’s really the effects of the situation that show the good and bad in people and companies.

In any case, Eyjafjallajokull, you just keep doing your thing. Humans will sort themselves out eventually. And if you decide I shouldn’t be going to the US, well then, I guess I’ll just have to go with the staycation option and try not to sulk too much til you change your mind.

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By Kate, 15 April 2009 1:56 pm

DELAYED

We arrived in Melbourne, not at 7pm like we were supposed to, but at 5am the next morning due to a typhoon in Hong Kong (which was our long haul flight’s stopover). I won’t get into boring details, but spending 7 unexpected hours in Heathrow Terminal 4 after only 1 hour of your 24+ hours travelling time isn’t something I endorse. The only upside of the experience was the free food vouchers Qantas was nice enough to give us, which led to some much-needed lunchtime beers. Hours and hours later, Hong Kong was a blur of off the plane, through security, wander through various airport electronics shops, sit on the floor in a daze, back on the plane, take off through a massive rainstorm.

Melbourne showing us a lovely first morning.

To say we were tired when we finally got to Australia would be a gross understatement, but going to sleep right away would have screwed us up for days, so we dropped our stuff in the hostel and went for a walk in the gorgeous weather. The people of Melbourne were headed off to work and we were walking like zombies among them, but we couldn’t be happier about it.

Fish and chips in St Kilda.

At around 10am we decided we needed some kind of nap in order to function anywhere near normally, so we slept on and off til about 1pm and then decided to head out to St Kilda,the beachy bit of the city, for a late lunch and a poke around. We took a tram out and found a pub on the beach where we ate some fantastic fish and chips and had our first official Aussie beer while looking out at the water. We were REALLY on vacation now. And that lack-of-a-care-in-the-world feeling persisted from that moment til the end of the month-long excursion.

The roller coaster at Luna Park.

We checked out Luna Park while we were in St Kilda, but we were still too sleepy to consider standing in line to ride the old roller coaster. The thing is controlled by a guy who stands on the car operating a handbrake. He just goes round and round on it all day. Amazing! On our way back to the tram, we got some seriously amazing gelato. I had chocolate and blood orange and Scott had white chocolate wasabi. The latter was a taste explosion of the best kind, but hard to eat more than a few spoonfuls.

Fruit for miles!

Melbourne had a lot of fantastic things for a foodie and a beer aficionado. We went to the Queen Victoria Market which, in addition to a lot of random crap and silly souvenirs, has miles of fruit, veg, meat, fish, bakery, and deli products, most from local growers and producers, and all at really reasonable prices. On our last day, I also discovered a company called ReWine which sells unbranded wine from various wineries all over the region for reduced prices in reusable, refillable plastic screwtop wine bottles. You bring your bottles back for refills and it costs even less. Plus they let you try before you buy. I only wish we had been sticking around longer so I could go back for more. And I must mention the meat at the market. There must have been something like 20 different butchers, and we bought two huge rump steaks for $6 AUD (about £3GBP or $5USD at the time). We were definitely the envy of the spaghetti-cooking hostel kitchen that night.

So many cows, so little time. I don't even know what kind these are, but they were enjoying lounging about.

We also went to the Royal Melbourne Show, which is sort of like an enormous county fair. We saw so many different kind of cows—I didn’t even know that many different kinds existed—as well as all sorts of other animals. And in the main pavilion, we did a local beer tasting and sampled loads of local produce and specialties. This is prime stuff on vacation for me. I love seeing and tasting all the local stuff.

Apparently, we missed out on a lot of the big shows in the arena—sheep shearing, wood chopping, etc. We just couldn’t get our vacation brains in an organised enough state to sort out a schedule. But we had a blast anyway. We love animals! And we saw tons of them! (We were amused that they even had highland cows.) We even got wise to the Australian obsession with showbags, though we’ve yet to really understand the fuss. It seems that you pay for a bag full of mostly cheap crap and candy and get really excited about it. Every place on earth is entitled to their own wacky traditions.

The next day was the day of the Aussie Rules Grand Final. Australian Rules football, from what I can tell (which isn’t a whole lot when we’re talking sports), is a sort of mix between rugby and American football. It was invented to occupy cricket pitches in the off-season, so it’s played on a big oval. Melbourne is absolutely mad about Aussie Rules, so the excitement in the air was actually palpable. We didn’t bother getting tickets to the match because the cheapest ones were about $150 AUD, so we just planned to catch the game in a pub or something later on.

An appeal to the ladies. In Scots! (at the Immigration Museum)

We started the day at the Immigration Museum, which had a lot of great interactive exhibits for us to play in. The coolest was probably the different eras of ship’s cabin that people would have stayed in on their way to Oz. The other exhibit I found really interesting was the one about a Latvian family. Back in Latvia, they used to be weavers (or at least the woman was) and when they moved away, they had to leave all the equipment behind. So the woman recorded all the traditional Latvian weaving patterns from memory in one of her notebooks and eventually, her husband gathered up all the equipment he needed to build her a new loom. Then she was able to make traditional wedding dresses and things for all the other Latvian immigrants because she had remembered all the patterns. It was really impressive. I know I’m forgetting important bits of the story, but that’s the general line of it.

I do love you Jamie Oliver. And your restaurant too.

We went to Jamie Oliver’s Melbourne branch of Fifteen for lunch, which I had been looking forward to for months. We were oddly enough the only people there because of the Grand Final. They hadn’t been expecting anyone that day, but we were treated like royalty and the food was amazing. Scott had carpaccio and some kind of pea and bean risotto, and I had seared tuna to start and smoked duck risotto for my main. We were too stuffed for dessert, unfortunately, but we did get to watch one of the chefs in the kitchen preparing some crazy looking octopus tentacles.

Damn near half the city watching the Grand Final in Federation Square.

We headed to a pub after lunch to watch the first half of the game, then on to Federation Square—Melbourne’s answer to the Sydney Opera house in terms of landmarks—for the last quarter. They had a huge screen set up in the middle of the square and there were hordes of people there cheering for their favourite team. The Hawks (who were apparently the underdogs of the situation) won the game and everyone around us exploded. I couldn’t tell you exactly how they won or what really happened because I found it hard to pay attention to a game on a giant screen when there were so many people around to watch, but the experience was interesting in any case. As people filtered out of the square, we went for a walk across the river before our last dinner in Melbourne, which was something simple cooked in the hostel kitchen again.

This hot chocolate alone was worth the trip. Seriously.

I was sad to leave Melbourne, not only because it signified the beginning of a great holiday and an awesome adventure, but because I would love nothing more than to live there. I won’t lie, this urge has a lot to do with the Queen Victoria Market and the fact that the city has more restaurants and cafes per capita than pretty much anywhere else on earth. But it’s also the feel of the city. It’s not a big place, but it’s got everything you need in a small space. And sometimes the smallness of the space makes what they pack in to it all the more attractive. There are so many little shopping arcades that form a maze of secret passageways between the streets of the city and they all hide such great little shops and places to eat, not to mention the best hot chocolate I’ve ever come across. I miss Melbourne, and I sincerely hope I get to go back someday soon, and hopefully for longer than a few days this time.

More in this series:

Australia (Part 1)