kaolin fire presents :: photo gallery

Australia - Merlin & Mel (Sydney; King's Corner)

Well, it was great to see Merlin again after six or seven years. And it was great to meet Mel. And it was great to see Australia. I do need to see more of it next time, but this time was *strictly* vacation, and that meant -- a lot of rest.

The flight there was humdedum, the flight back was basically the same. I could say a lot of boring stuff (and I may in any case) but I'd rather try not to and see what happens.

Once I was through customs in Australia I heard a wonderful "Hey!" (or something like that) and turned to see two people just arriving dressed in all black (they'd just come from the Hellfire club, where the club scene of the Matrix was shot). Well, just is relative, but most things are. In any case it was a well and welcome warm welcome. :) We trudged through the airport to the train system (much like the bart system only more expensive and I think it covers more area).

Also... the trains were multilevel. That was kinda snifty.

So we make it back to their apartment where I spend most of my trip. We take a bunch of photos and I gawk at their balcony and beyond (merlin has a snifty little telescope ideal for watching the moon or boats in the bay). He teaches us _progressive gin rummy_ which is an intriguing mix between gin, rummy, and canasta. This is much played (as archived by the picture of the table and scoring pad above).

We went out to eat several times, ate in a bit, slept erratically, all got piercings (as evidenced above -- I got my lip pierced, Merlin got his lip pierced, and Melanie got her nose pierced ... all at the Steel Lotus, info above). We did a fair amount of walking from piercing shop to tattoo shop to piercing shop during the day at this point -- just after Mardi Gras weekend, and I had to take a picture of them walking in front of me -- it was a common enough occurrence for many hours.

To pass some of the time, I convinced Merlin to help me with his site (or he tricked me into helping him with his site, or something), so we discussed a little bit and put together scorpios. He plans to do a fair bit more work with it, and I *hope* he (or Mel) sticks with it, but it's a fair template to begin with. :)

Meanwhile, I drank much much much coffee, dabbled with a new-ish drawing style, pondered stories, tried to convince Mel to join imaginaries, thought about random things, caught up with merlin, scanned through Mel's sketchbook, and played LOTS and LOTS of cards. :)

One night, while merlin was at work (he worked graveyard), Mel and I snuck out of the everpresent condo and took a walk. I learned a lot about my camera that night, and must needs take myself out in the dark with it more often. Some very trippy (artsy?) pictures (well, blurry, but cool) were taken. Sydney is a very cool place. We walked for seven hours following the coastline as best we could (ish) -- as evidenced by the shot of the opera house from a ways away (with bridge in shot), a shot of the opera house from a bit closer, and then a shot of the opera house from the bridge.

The bridge was very cool. We found it, walked up it a ways, and explored many of its nooks and crannies (but not all -- if we'd gone during the day we could have ridden an elevator to the near-top and climbed (ish) up the rest of the way and have been way above the rest of the world, and that would have been cool, but I didn't feel like committing a felony (or whatnot) a day or two before leaving... not when I figured it was fairly likely someone would see us doing some unauthorized climbing (hello? blatant? visible? highly trafficed? it's a bridge!). Ah well.

One thing I saw a fair amount of that I couldn't take a picture of were the amazingly huge fruit bats. I only caught one or two decent glimpses of them (full bodied, in light, soaring -- the rest were them sleeping at a bad angle, or large black shapes in the distance) but they were beautiful. Mayhaps next time I go (yes, oh yes, there will be a next time!) I will be able to set up some nice shots of them. Merlin liked to refer to them as flying foxes, and that was rather apt. I could see how the dracula myths stemmed from fruit bats. Oh, and they had a piercing shriek. Beautiful, just beautiful. :)

Soon enough, it was time to go home. So I did. But I have plans to go back at the latest next year and at the earliest in a few months. Beautiful place. As clean and "nouveau" as Vancouver, almost as interesting as San Francisco, and definitely significantly (sydnificantly?) more laid back. I'm thinking of looking into grad school at the university of sydney. :)