The title says it all… I am back in ordinary-boring-wet-cold little Belgium…

I boarded a plane Saturday evening to swap a warm, sunny and fun Melbourne with a cold, rainy and boring place in the middle of nowhere.. Now I understand why Australia needs tough immigration laws.. without those all the planes to Australia would be full and those leaving empty! 🙂

Back in Melbourne.. I took a flight this afternoon.. and this may sound strange, but once I had dropped off all my luggage at the hotel and walked to South Bank I felt like I was back home.. I know I’ve only been here for a couple of weeks, yet it already feels a bit like home.. tomorrow I have to fly to my previous, more permanent, boring & cold home though.. pitty!! 😥

What I left today – even after only a couple of days – already hurt, so I don’t want to think about what tomorrow will be like.. flying back to that gray boring country that isn’t really a country anymore..

Today I moved from a room at a friend’s place outside Sydney to a room in a backpackers hotel in the city center.. There ‘s a tiny detail to it though that ended up being a little more serious then I had anticipated.. since my hosts had gone to work, my motorised transport to the railway station was also gone.. and since I couldn’t check in before noon I wanted to stay at their place for bit longer as well.. It was one of those days though.. not really very hot, but HUMID! And then around noon the sun broke through the cloudcover… So instead of a relaxed walk to the station I went through a 25 minute long torment. I was carrying 3 bags so could barely walk properly and on top of that, the second I got out the door I was bathing in sweat.. Normally when you sweat, you expell excess heat and you are supposed to cool a bit. But with this high humidity all it did was drip off of me and ruin another set of clothing.. I think during that 25 minute walk I must have lost 5 kilos worth of water.. 😐

So I managed to get here after all… Sydney!

Arriving here it felt like entering a Finnish sauna, only this one has no exit…
I’ve had some hot days in Melbourne – though not as many as I ‘d have liked – but not something like this.. I don’t mind the heat, but it s a moist sweaty heat.. guess by the time I get used to it, I will be on a plane back to sub-zero Belgium… and to be honest, even though I’m not yet dealing with the humidity too well, lying on a beach or in a park in the sun is preferable over freezing in Europe every time you go out the door.. Ideally I ‘d have a job where I’d have to work in Australia during (European) winter and in Europe during summer.. 🙄

Okay.. I had a bit of a scare yesterday… largely caused by the excess power banks have nowadays…

Yesterday morning, whenever I tried to get money from an ATM it showed a message stating the transaction was cancelled by my bank.. I thought maybe they were having issues, but a few hours later it still didn’t work, so I asked my parents to check it out.. Than, yesterday evening (local time) I got a message that my VISA had been blocked, yet the card I had been having issues with was my regular MAESTRO card (which they said should be working fine).. So here I was – on the other side of the planet – thinking I had no working card left.. and with only 20$ cash remaining.

This time no tourist loaded bus trip.. the sky is crystal clear so instead I walked through some of Melbourne’s parks looking for a good spot to do absolutely nothing 😀

There s a lot of small parks all over Melbourne, most of them just outside the business district and in the suburbs, but plenty are within walking distance of my hotel.. I ended up in the Fitzroy Gardens and though not big, it was the perfect place for a nap in the shade..
Not much else to say about yesterday.. I merely enjoyed doing as little as humanly possible 😉

Oké, I know I’ve never been very good at this, and probably never will be, but I don’t think I’ve had to do this much last-minute planning before…

I only yesterday got confirmation that this week is the last week I have to work here.. next week I have a week off in Australia, but I have no place to go or stay at yet 🙄
I can’t even stay in my current hotel because they are fully booked over the weekend so I ‘ll have to do some hotel hopping..

I did it again!!! I went on another tourist bus trip.. guess I just don’t learn.. 🙂

This time we went to the Blue Dandenongs, a low mountain range just about an hour drive east of Melbourne. They tend to have a much cooler climate than Melbourne and apparently are known as a premium gardening district. It s also home to a temperate rainforest protected as a National Park. The bus driver kept talking about the Mountain Ash which is most dominant tree in this rainforest and could potentially be the largest (hardwood) trees on the planet.. there s no way to prove that though because all the old ones were cut down so the forest is pretty young.