Melbourne

From KL back to Singapore, then off to Melbourne. One of the crappier airport experiences I’ve had was at the Tiger Airways “terminal” in Melbourne. Tiger Airways, in case you aren’t aware, is a Singapore-based budget airline that covers much of Australia and various points in SE Asia. “Budget” is the operative word here. Everything feels small and cramped, the stewardess outfits are cheap-looking, and if you were choking on a peanut they wouldn’t give you a drop of water unless you paid for it first. But that won’t happen, because they don’t give you peanuts either.

The Melbourne airport was recently voted one of the world’s top five airports, but the Tiger terminal is not in the Melbourne Airport. It’s in the middle of a parking lot or something, several minutes away from the airport, and is literally composed of unpainted concrete cinder blocks and cyclone fencing. It’s exactly what I imagine the place where the planes land in Guantanamo Bay to look like.

Melbourne was my first taste of the western world in over a year and it was a bit overwhelming initially. I suddenly had a reference point for how long I’ve been away. Posters for bands and movies I haven’t heard of, bookstores with unfamiliar new releases, the way people looked, the clothes they wore. Something about it made me miss everyone and everything so much more acutely. And at the same time, I had the pointed realization that I don’t feel the same way about the world anymore, that I don’t belong to the world in quite the same way anymore.

That said, Melbourne seems like it’s one of those cool but underrated cities. Or maybe it’s that place that just perpetually underrates itself. I kept seeing all these signs proclaiming Melbourne as “The World’s Most Livable City,” (and occasionally, the world’s second most livable city) which strikes me as such a funny thing to boast about. Such a modest superlative… livable.

I’m not even quite sure what the criteria are for such a designation. Melbourne has a tram, which seems to be a very ‘livable’ kind of thing. It’s also a place you can walk around in. Then there are probably all the good ratios of teachers-to-students and average commute time and housing prices and number of museums per capita and the like.

All of which is certainly important. But I also think it’s a way to say something about your city when it’s hard to find something to say about it. I don’t mean that in a bad way, Melbourne honestly seems like it’s got a ton of art & music & great places to eat and little streets and neighborhoods I was dying to explore. But there’s no one thing that screams “Melbourne!” at you.

Even its tallest building, the 91-story Eureka Tower, is the most unassuming skyscraper I’ve ever seen. It has almost the opposite impact of the Petronas Towers. I kept losing sight of it, or I would see it from a different angle and it would seem to be only the fourth or fifth tallest building in the city. Even standing next to it, you could honestly not notice it was there. How is this possible? It just kind of tapers upwards and disappears…

The city I most associate with the “livable” tag in the US is Portland, because I know it’s got parks and streetcars and people walk around and ride bikes in it, but when I think of Portland I also think of Gus Van Zant and Elliott Smith and I just have the sense that there is also something dark and real coursing around the streets and alleys of Melbourne, something the civic boosters and committees and the tourism people can’t put on a sign and I’d like to know what it is.

PS As if to underscore what I wrote above, I realized I did not take a single photograph in the four days I was in Melbourne. Granted, I was busy visiting hostels with the guidebook editor, but still.

WORD TO THE WISE: If you order an iced coffee in Melbourne there’s a good chance there will be freaking ice cream in it.