Gosh darn it's been a while

Hey what a surprise! I lost interest in blogging after a few short weeks! Well, hopefully that will change, but we'll see.

Well it's now officially Xmas, which is of course the time of year when we try to eat as much pig as possible. This is the real reason our Jewish and Muslim buddies don't celebrate this day. So today will feature bacon, ham, roast pork, and possibly other pieces of some poor hogs anatomy that I can get my hands on. As far as pressies go, my Girlfriend and I didn't get each other anything big, but instead shouted ourselves to a little pre-xmas holiday in Melbourne. The main motivation for this little journey to the deep south was to catch the excellent GreenDay world tour 2005, supported by my favourite band of the moment, Jimmy Eat World . The show was amazing, only real disapointments for me were the low volume and shortness of JEW's set, but GreenDay were pretty awesome putting in a full 2 1/2 hour set. I sorta wish I hadn't watched the 'Bullet in a Bible' DVD before hand as with such a big stadium production things have to be fairly tightly scripted and the shows were almost identical, but enough extra material was added to keep it fresh.

Our time in Melbourne was great, with the city really living up to it's reputation as the best place to eat and shop in Aus. Cafe's, restaurants and bars are absolutely everywhere, with every different variety of cuisine and price range you could ask for, and we probably would have had to take an extra few days for Kim to check out all the shops in Chappel st. The 2 things that really stood out for me though were how good the public transport system there is, and how terrible the road network is. It's not the roads are poor quality, it's just that it's totally disorganised, with poor signing, narrow streets, and seemingly no real defined main arteries to get you from one area to another. Driving in Brisbane is much simpler, and not just because it has half the population, but because you can look at a street directory and plot a course, then follow the signage to get there. Melbourne is the closest thing to driving in Malaysia that I've come across yet in Aus, luckily we could get most places on the excellent tram network and leave the car ( a rented BA Falcon, which had the cheapest crap tyres money could buy fitted) in the hotel carpark.