Love, life and style in Melbourne

by Yeoh Siew Hoon

I hadn’t been to Melbourne for a few years and, as such, was looking forward to my return and what better way to arrive than on business class on Emirates.

It was my first time on the Middle Eastern airline that, at one time, looked like it was going to take over the world but now may be faltering amid these difficult times, and I was curious. I had heard good reviews, and I wasn’t disappointed. Okay, the crew’s less polished than Singapore Airlines but hey, I can handle a little spontaneity.

The food’s also not as good but man, I love the big television screen and the control board that feels like a huge game console. It took me a while to work it out but once I did, I felt like I was ready to fly the plane. Give me movies and I’m happy as a bunny in a flat bed.

Arriving at 9.30am was however not the best of times to land in Melbourne airport. It was jammed packed with people.

At some level I was happy because it’s nice to know people are still travelling but at another, it meant long, long queues at customs.

After clearing customs which took an hour, I stepped outside and thought I was back in school. There were foreign (read Asian) students everywhere, being met by men holding signs.

Curious, I asked a woman at the meet-and-greet counter if Melbourne airport was always so busy at this time. “No, it’s all these foreign students coming to take places in schools that our children can’t get into,” she barked at me.

I hoped it was because she thought I was a foreign student but I doubt it.

The first person I call is a girlfriend who moved to Melbourne 10 years ago with her husband and two children. She is Malaysian, the husband is Welsh and the two children are now adults, grown up in Victoria.

I hadn’t seen her for a few years and that’s the thing with old friends. When you meet each other after an absence, no matter how long, the years just fall away and you pick up like it was yesterday.

Monica worked in a bank in Hong Kong and is now a supermarket checkout girl. I’ve never seen her so contented.

“It’s easy work,” she says. “I don’t have to think. And now I take orders and handle deliveries for old people who can’t shop for themselves.”

They live in a big, beautiful house close to the beach. They have possums and squirrels in their backyard and she does a lot of gardening. She loves the lifestyle.

And that’s what Melbourne has loads of. Life. Style. The city’s changed in the time I’ve been away. Yes, the Yarra River still flows and I love the walks and people-watching you can do as you sit in one of the many restaurants, bars and cafes on the river bank.

But on top of it now sits the new Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre. The Crown is opening a third hotel in early 2010 and I am told it is being built at the pace of one floor every six days.

Not being from the construction business, I don’t know how that compares to China or Canada but it is an impressive statistic.

I head off to the Docklands for a lunch and there I saw the Southern Star, Melbourne’s Big Wheel, looking rather still and forlorn.

The structure buckled under the recent heatwave and who knows how much money it’s going to cost to get it moving again.

It cost the Singapore Flyer buckets of money to get it turning in the right direction so as not to upset its “feng shui” elements and still it caught fire, and was shut down by the authorities for
a while.

I was blessed with good weather for the four days I was there – sunny, dry, and always a cool breeze. The terrible heat wave and bush fires had just ended. Melbourne, I guess, would not have been as pleasant at 47 degrees.

On the surface, it would seem the global financial crisis had not (yet) hit Melbourne that hard. The city seemed busy. The casino hummed. Restaurants by the river were packed. I passed by a crowded Federation Square one evening. “It’s really busy,” I remarked to my taxi driver.

“Yes, it’s Valentine’s Day,” he said. It was actually the day after but call it a love hangover.

He told me he was from Mumbai and had been in Melbourne for five years. He’d only been driving a month. He lost his job at Telstra. Call that an economic hangover.

I am glad though I did not meet the woman at the airport again.

Goodness knows what she would have had to say about that.

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