Victoria trip Thursday 17/1/08
Thursday, 31 January, 2008
This is our second Melbourne day.
We're up reasonably early and ready to shop. Anita says not to wait for her with regard to breakfast, so Liwen and I make our own and scoff it down while she takes her turn in the shower. We're ready in, like, record speed. And we hop in Jasmine the car and drive to Melbourne for some serious DFO (Direct Factory Outlets) shopping. “How much shopping can you handle?” asks the brochure. We're about to find out.
I've never been to a DFO before but Anita says that the one in Sydney is crap; Essendon, Melbourne, is definitely better. We're there by about 11:30 and we park in the massive carpark surrounded by giant brand warehouses like JB Hifi and some homewares store that proclaims itself to be “The best homewares store in the world*”—with the asterisk signalling a footnote: “According to our internal staff pole”. Obviously a very intelligent piece of office architecture in dreadful need of a subeditor ...
DFO itself was a giant warehouse broken up into shops so it made you feel like you in a mall without all the crazy lights and fake plants. (Well, maybe there were some fake plants but I don't remember them!) First stop was Jacqui E which was a favourite for both Liwen and Anita.
Clothes shopping is a funny thing. There's not many people you can do it with (well, I can't, anyway), and if you're with people who are really into it and whose opinion you trust, you find yourself trying on things you wouldn't normally pick for yourself. And not necessarily because they pick them out for you (though, after a while, you get a taste of the sorts of things that they like, and you start picking out stuff for them. And then feel a bit of satisfaction if you happen to get it right! Like I picked out this skirt at Colorado for Anita and it turns out she already owns it! [Okay, maybe she wore it on an earlier day and I had only noticed it subconsciously ...]).
The other funny thing about clothes shopping is that it brings out all the insecurities you have about your body. So hugely unhelpful. It's like clothes are only made for one type of body shape, and if you don't fit into that mould, you start feeling like something's wrong with you. For example, your height may be right and you may be skinny enough, but then your breasts may be too small. Or your shoulders too broad. Or something. At that point, haute couture starts looking like a viable option. (Too expensive; maybe I should get sewing lessons ...)
The other funny thing about clothes shopping is what's in fashion. I have to say that baby doll dresses, scoop necklines, small puffy sleeves, psychedelic patterns and clashing colours (e.g. green and purple and orange) really aren't my cup of tea, and I wondered whether they were, in fact, anyone's cup of tea as there were so many of them there (for, presumably, it's the stuff that doesn't sell that gets brought to DFO to see if they can sell it for cheaper). You start to wonder who were the brainiacs who came up with the stuff. Surely they weren't the Miranda Priestly types in The Devil Wears Prada!
We didn't progress too far in the first couple of hours. After Jacqui E came Portmans, Just Jeans, Giordano and Colorado, and then we were hungry so went to the food court for lunch. (I was so pleased to find they had sushi!)
Afterwards, the shopping continued, with Ginger Tree, Garfunkle, Table Eight and many many shoe stores (me following Liwen and Anita around, trying to understand the appeal of shoes. Some of them are pretty but hugely impractical—at least for me. I'm very uncoordinated; if I wore heels, I'd be likely to fall off them and break my neck.) Oh, and there was a discount bookstore where I got three hardbacks for $30 (yes, trust me to get more excited about the books than the clothes!): a Russell Hoban novel (Come Dance with Me) and two Jasper Fforde books in the Thursday Next series (Lost in a Good Book and The Well of Lost Plots). I've never read any Jasper Fforde but people keep telling me I should, so I mooched the first one and I figured that if I really didn't like them, someone could mooch them off me. As for Russell Hoban, the first book of his that I ever read was The Mouse and His Child which is one of the most delightful children's books I've ever read. It's about this pair of clockwork mice who dance together when they've been wound up. They get sold from a toy store but then they get broken and separated, and the story is about how they are reunited. There are all sorts of lovely little bits in it—like the crows flying overhead shouting out newspaper headlines ... I should read it again sometime as I've only read it once for Uni. The other Hoban book I really enjoyed was The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz which has this splendid passage in it in the opening pages:
Jachin-Boaz traded in maps. He bought and sold maps, and some, of certain kinds for special uses, he made or had others make for him. That had been his father's trade, and the walls of the shop that had been his father's were hung with glazed blue oceans, green swamps and grasslands, brown and orange mountains delicately shaded. Maps of towns and plains he sold, and other maps made to order. He would sell a young man a map that showed where a particular girl might be found at different hours of the day. He sold husband maps and wife maps. He sold maps to poets that showed where thoughts of power and clarity had come to other poets. He sold well-digging maps. He sold vision-and-miracle maps to holy men, sickness-and-accident maps to physicians, money-and-jewel maps to thieves, and thief maps to the police.
(Russell Hoban, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, p. 10.)
Since then, I've started collecting Russell Hoban novels which is kind of silly because I haven't read any further. But I own Kleinzit, Turtle Diary, Ridley Walker (which Karen A says is absolutely brilliant but almost completely unreadable), Pilgermann and The Medusa Frequency. Oh, and I also own and have read The Trokeville Way but I barely remember a thing about it.
Back to clothes shopping.
By the end of the day, I somehow ended up with the three books mentioned above, three black tops (umm, yes ... but they were all different! One was cotton, one was linen and one was silk. Umm, yes ...), a shirt for my brother and two bras. And I had also failed to find the perfect summer dress.
The perfect summer dress warrants a paragraph of its own. Girls seem to understand when I talk about the perfect summer dress. It seems to be that elusive thing that one searches for ever summer but rarely has a hope of finding. For me, the perfect summer dress is 100% cotton, dark blue, not too low-cut at the front (mainly because it's rather disconcerting having males other than your husband staring at your breasts, and unfortunately certain types of males do tend to stare) and reasonably priced, if not cheap. (Cheap is an added bonus!) To me, the perfect summer dress should not cost more than $60 and would be a steal at $30.
But alas, in the whole of DFO, there was no such thing!
Anyway, by 6 pm we were all shopped out and everywhere was closing. Plus, we were due to meet some of Anita's friends for dinner. So we hopped back in the car and drove to Brunswick St which is, if you Victorians will pardon my comparison, a lot like Newtown—full of funky shops, cool restaurants and cafés and seemingly arty people.
Anita had booked a restaurant called the Afghan Gallery. We ate in the upper room which was decorated with rugs and lanterns.
We sat on cushioned seats around a low table, and we were joined by Natalie and Sandra J (who I had met before at National Training Event. [Hi Sandra!] Anita was a bit miffed that Sandra and I had met face-to-face earlier as she had been looking forward to the pleasure of introducing us. Sandra's been reading this blog for a while, and had worked out from this entry when Ben and I went to eat dinner with Anita in 2005 that we had a common friend.)
It was a lovely evening with great food—
—(I dare say Anita's friends thought I was a bit mad, photographing my food all the time)—and interesting conversation about books, writing, religion and so on.
(This was a dessert called “sheepera” made of milk, rosewater, cardamon and pistachio. It was very sweet!)
Afterwards, Natalie had to say goodbye but Sandra went with us down the street to go to San Churro for chili hot chocolate. I got waylaid by a bookstore, so they left me in it and brought me back some. (It was delicious!)
Then we said goodbye to Sandra, got in the car again and drove to Crown Casino. (Parking is a flat rate of $10 for the entire day which was a bit annoying because we were only there for half an hour to an hour, tops.) We walked around a bit—showed Liwen the lobby with the light show and the fountain (which wasn't being very spectacular)—used the toilets upstairs (which were very fancy but the view was nothing on the Sofitel) ... Liwen admired the lattice work and the lights through the lattice—
—which was quite pretty—and we walked along the Yarra, but the area seemed very dead and lifeless, compared to Brunswick Street which was still buzzing when we had left it. So we drove home, arriving back in Warragul at around 1 am.
Current:
Bible: Isaiah (ESV) 28/09/2010
seen: Tropic Thunder 26/09/2010
seen: The Life of Mammals 24/09/2010
seen: What a Girl Wants 19/09/2010
seen: Jerry Maguire 19/09/2010
seen: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 06/09/2010
seen: Tomorrow Never Dies 05/09/2010
seen: Nanny McPhee 28/08/2010
read: Mercury (Hope Larson) 27/08/2010
read: Spellcheckers Vol 1 (Jamie S Rich, Nicolas Hitori de, Joelle Jones) 16/08/2010
read: Solipsistic Pop Vol 2 (Solipsistic Pop) 16/08/2010
read: Chiggers (Hope Larson) 15/08/2010
seen: Josie and the Pussycats 14/08/2010
seen: Mr & Mrs Smith 14/08/2010
seen: Step Up 2 13/08/2010
Blinks:
How to recalibrate the home button on your iPhone.
Unsolicited manuscripts accepted by Pan Macmillan with certain conditions.
Thought Balloon is a group blog in which the writers tackle a new theme every week? month? with one-page scripts. This URL is for their Phonogram ones.
How to sew a zipper on a knitted garment.
Issues organised by tale.
Online magazine that publishes fairy tales that are not reworkings of old tales.
Journal that publishes fairy tale writing.
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I would recommend learning to sew. Sometimes it means you can make the perfect summer dress. Sometimes it just means you’ll learn why no-one else was able to either
I love Jasper Fforde. Maybe the Eyre Affair is the slowest. I love him so much that I went to see him read at Waterstones on Charing Cross Road when the latest Thursday Next book was released and then I ALSO went and saw him do almost the same talk with my friend Jennie because we were in Edinburgh on holiday the next week and she couldn’t make the London event. He’s a lovely man (mad, very mad!) and always makes me laugh. There is a great chapter in Lost in a Good Book where Thursday goes and changes the ending to an Enid Blyton novel.