iboyfriend4

i'm smitten with my iphone4. g is so jealous it's not even funny. it's got to the stage where he doesn't even want it sleeping in the same room as us. "i'm not adequate anymore because i'm not an iboyfriend4". damn straight.

i downloaded a little app called 'autostitch' which stitches together photos. you just take them, dump them in in no particular order, and voila! check out my offerings below! keep in mind that it's not just one or two photos: the picture of our street taken off the balcony is a composite of 42 different photos. these are all 180° shots:

the view from dover street that we'll soon be saying goodbye to! :(

corner of swanston and flinders

fed 口

birrarung marr (northside)

the yarra from birrarung mar

nepal flashback

i am so impressed with my little autostitch app that i decided to go back and stitch together some of the panorama photos that i had taken in nepal (in Dec 2003/jan 2004 - pre blog times!!!) here are a few of them. you can click on the images for further detail.

warrnambool

yeah it was good: really good. i hope they'll have me back next year! fingers crossed.

vov came back to australia for a few days before heading off to nz. here's what we do during our family gatherings:

smash it

in my last entry 3 weeks ago i had just done my french C1 and was about to fly off to wodonga for the weekend for some locum work. today i've just finished my german A2 exam and tomorrow i jump on a train for a weekend of work in warrnambool. as i suspected, life is just a series of goethian repetitions. here's a pic i shouldn't have taken from the window as the plane was coming in to land in wodonga. it was so lush!!! thanks la nina weather pattern!

after a recent muslim festival, all the ladies at work were turning up with henna tattoos. here's a hand that i snappety snapped of one of my lovely patients. henna me up girls.

pong organised a paint-ball event that i was unfortunately unable to refuse, no matter how devastatingly intense the desire to pike on the piker ;) it was bogansville with guns. not a good look. we marched out to play, fully dressed in camouflage with masks and coloured armbands etc, so as to be unable to recognise individuals, just teams. i had a millionth of an inkling of what war might be like in that moment. anonymous. just kill the people opposite you because they're a different colour or because your boss has told you too. 'i blew phuong's head off because julia gillard told me to'.

the death squad: mee-hong, phuong #2, yi, phuong original version, darren, anthony, hello_ondrej

i felt sickened and deeply troubled looking around at the machos shooting each other, though was able to put this feeling aside for just a few moments during the wild west game where i was opposite the bank door with immunity and just took 'em all out. shudder. i'm still afraid of guns, even if they only contain paint. check out one bruised thigh below. as it turns out, paint fucking hurts.

here's a quick grab of g and i with zee and emma when they visited melbourne today before their massive world wide adventure next year!! bon voyage ladies!

now that all the exams are over, our life might go back to normal again. can't wait to cut loose this summer! as the weather hots up melbourne men are stripping off and i am liking what i'm seeing on the streets of this town more and more. regarding those exams (for interested parties), i passed. the chinese A2, the french C1, and though i don't have the results for the german A2 i did today, i'm pretty sure i smashed it ;) i'm feeling proud of myself. almost as proud as i feel about the success i've had with my beautiful home grown cacti!!!

DALF C1

this is a photo of the clouds hanging above cremorne as i crossed the yarra on my way home from sitting the DALF C1 today. they look menacing, but not as menacing as the five and a half hours of exam i just sat. the experience can be aptly summarised by the french term 'cunt-fucked'. we'll see. tomorrow i fly to wodonga in another attempt to sponsor our new life overseas. meanwhile, g continues to create...

rose street artists' market

g setting up

the rose street artists' market advertises itself as 'australia's premier arts market'. the implication is that the australian arts scene is dominated by cashed-up bogans. hoping to join their ranks, g set up shop for the first time on sunday!

a bee-lamp

frog lamp

this dragonfly lamp that sold like a hotcake and represented the first money that g ever earned on australian soil! woohoo!

louie's 30th

a pic showing the birthday hag...and my blue contacts!!!

louie's sister (whose name i've temporarily forgotten *blush*) is simply stunning

here's me getting some lip-on-cheek action from another stunner

the only photo of the birthday girl's new fiancé in which he doesn't look like a fat-faced drug addict...

g gorging on some turkish bread on the way home! (with black CLs!)

had to put this one in: the number plate that caz should have had

smells like summer!

the weather's getting warmer and summer is making its belated appearance in marvellous melbourne!

what better occasion than a sunny day to ride along the river into town for a good feed at one of our funky laneway cafés? loving melbs!

headphone lovedream

here's the view from the resident's room at the women's. overnight when i had time to spare (usually a couple of hours between 3am and 5am), i would listen to my mp3 player whilst lying on the couch below this window, looking out at the lights of melbourne glowing in the night.

my old earphones broke, and the only spare ones i had were those i had taken from my last qantas flight on the way home from broken hill. a cheap set that were designed to fail. they did what they were made to do, so i cut them up and sticky-taped them to the wall in the residents' room with thought bubbles saying "i think i'm falling in love with you" and "oh baby don't say that". yes, readers, this is where your hard-earned taxpayers money is going: headphone lovedream.

so günter right now...

double double, toil and trouble...

will the baguette be swapped for the pretzel? will g and o remove their berets only to find themselves in lederhosen?! watch this space...

Le Corbeau et le Renard

was it all just a charade?

I was a dragonfly, flying contentedly

Then i awoke with this fuck-off, splitting headache.

happy father's day

dad and i postponed father's day for 48 hours to take advantage of better weather. we ended up making this music clip! i've been wanting to sing this song with dad for about a decade but have never really had an appropriate forum. it is, of course, 'father and son' by yusuf islam. thank goodness for youtube! make sure you select the 480p setting for better images on this and all of my clips! happy father's day dad!

i love you michael!

with the love of my life away playing in paris, the fact of missing him has manifested as a tiny little buzz of creative energy. here's my homage one of the king's finest!

chris garneau

chris garneau has a really unique voice and over the last couple of days i've become addicted to this song, which is sung in french and english!!! it's called lucioles/fireflies. when i first heard the song i thought it was a woman's voice and i was surprised when i googled him to find out that he's a man. a man with an amazing voice!

Day Eighteen - Darwin to Dover Street

the final day passed in slow motion fast forward. spooning on a hammock in the middle of winter...

eating crêpes with chocolate and crème while dripping with sweat at a sunday morning market...in the middle of winter.

saying goodbye to our sexy hosts and catching a hybrid taxi to the airport, all the while sweating it out in shorts and t-shirt...in the middle of winter.

eating 4 frosty fruits tropical flavour on the flight home...

did i mention that we had been spooning in a hammock in the middle of winter?

and back to the apocalyptic freeze of melbourne where we've said goodbye to shorts and thongs, turned the heaters up to full blast...and plans are afoot for an even grander adventure...!

Day Seventeen - Darwin

we arrived in darwin on a late friday afternoon, headed straight to the bottleshop, then to 'asian noodle' for some takeaway asian noodle, and finally made our way to the coast in the city's north where we plonked ourselves down in the middle of darwin's gorgeous nudist beach, tore off our clothes, and watched the sunset naked drinking red wine and eating vegetable laksa. need i say it? it was glorious.

the wonderful zee and her delicious girlfriend emma put us up for our stay in darwin. they lived in this massive 4.5 bedroom house with 4 other people, 3 kittens, 2 hammocks, a tropical garden surrounding a swimming pool (see photo), and kitchen/dining area straight out of a 70's porn shoot. we loved it - thank you ladies!!!

jasper had to be returned on the saturday, so we woke early to unpack two and a half weeks of adventure and memory from his insides, give him a final scrub, and return him to wicked campers. despite previous bad experiences with hire cars (fuck u avis scumbags!), as soon as we told wicked-darwin that the drunkards in wicked-broome hadn't let us properly list jasper's pre-existing damage, they ticked the 'checked' box and finalised the return of our bond with only the most cursory glance in jasper's direction. thanks goodness.

check out my macho boyfriend: grrrrr!

we met up with emma at the parap market for some smoothie and laksa. there's something asian about darwin's markets: they're bustling and juicy and tropical and open and alive. so many wonderful things about that city! you don't even realise how much you've missed it until you get back there. g and i are putting serious consideration into making it our future (temporary) home. emma and zee lent us their bikes, and we were drawn magnetically back to the nudist beach for a further exploration of our liberty...

...and it was a complete liberation. we had more fun than we thought humanly possible on that little strip of sand: splashing in the jellyfish infested waters, mixing with strange naked people and being even stranger, getting that all-over body tan, and even discovering what else is in the teaches of peaches.

hot diggety check out this romantic shot that zee took of your boys under a palm tree watching the sun set at east point!

the girls took us out to a fancy restaurant on the beach where we had the best seats in the house, watched a partial lunar eclipse over dinner, and even had some fireworks go off half way through the night about 43 centimetres away from my right ear drum.

and of course which self-respecting person could visit darwin without an evening at throb nightclub, where the transexual with australia's largest breast implants put in an appearance to a thunderous lack of applause, a blond drag-queen with perfect breasts, a mischievous smile and legs that never ended had zee and g mesmerised and sliding off their seats with their tongues on the floor, and your gang of 4 dominated and redominated darwin's hottest dancefloor.

what better way to spend our last evening in paradise?!

Day Sixteen - Litchfield NP to Darwin

it was back to the buley rockhole at the crack of dawn to wash off all the blood and mosquito body parts. confucius say: when in paradise, fkk.

we took a detour down to 'the lost city', a bunch of rock formations dotted with human excrement and toilet paper.

we walked from the pestilential greenant creek to the average experience of tjaetaba falls, where one could bathe in a rockpool whose edge formed part of a 20 metre drop into the forests below. sounds amazing to even think about, but the murky waters and lack of view contrasted sharply with the other incredible places we had been.

and in our final stop before darwin, we visited florence falls. florence falls is a special place, with a plunge pool filled with massive fish and boulders, fed by two cascades, and packed with humans at any time of the year. young hoons with perfectly sculpted bodies and perfectly absent brains were climbing to the top of the waterfalls and doing flips off them to the amazement of the adoring crowds gathered below when suddenly, as if in some sort of shared religious vision, the ranger appeared (materialised?) at the top of one waterfall and started shouting in a macho voice for everyone to climb down (or was it the virgin mary wearing a ranger's outfit, fake beard and a very large pair of socks stuffed down the front of her pants?). in an act of defiance, all the hoons did their final backwards cartwheels from the 10 metre cliffs into the shallow waters below. it was amazing to watch, but i got that sick feeling in my stomach that someone's neck was going to snap, reinforced by my memories of all the young people with cervical spinal injuries that i saw when i was working in darwin (shudder). one guy (who was doing the most impressive flips) had even lost the skin off his nose and forehead, as if he'd already smacked his face against a rock at the bottom of the water. a strong candidate for the darwin awards.

it was at florence falls that i received one of the best compliments i've ever had in my life. a young frenchman overheard g and i talking and joined us for a short conversation whilst perched on a boulder in the middle of the plunge pool. afterwards he turned to me and asked "so are you belgian?". "so are you belgian?!!!" i almost had to be carried off in a stretcher.

when we'd had our fill, we decided to jump back into jasper and head off to our final destination. a minute before leaving, we found g's doppelgänger lounging on the banks of a river in the form of a goanna. the head and limbs were a bit different, but the jellybelly was unmistakeable!