Rainy city

 In Melbourne. When we disembarked it was like stepping into a warm bath; I liked it, unexpectedly. Slightly cloudy evening. This morning the clouds are low and raining, and I believe it is what people call cool. The shiny towers vanish upward into mistiness.
On the way in from the airport I kept looking at the clouds. I told myself it must be an illusion that they looked so different, then decided it was a combination of the wide expanse of sky, and being so much above gum leaves.
I have not found out the Boon Wurrung word for gum tree. No online dictionaries simply searchable, some I think I could download and I'll try that later today. It's distressing how absolutely nothing there is of the language here, to a tourist glance. There are some sculptures in the streets that look indigenous-influenced, nothing else to suggest to one that Melbourne was not the first habitation set up on this land. Google says there's a gallery of indigenous art not too far from us though, I will check it out.
Sam saw a raven on our trip in, but I was looking out the other side. Our apartment is nice, though a bit loud from the street. This morning I walked to the Yarra, and saw rainbow lorakeets. Now we are going out to breakfast and the aquarium.

Aquariumming

 We went out searching for a patisserie we'd heard about, but didn't find it. We settled hungrily on a mall bakery we happened to be next to - our savouries were fine, but Sam's lemon meringue pie was the best he can remember eating, and my pan au raisin was at least the nicest I've had in a long time. It wasn't a pan au raisin actually, it was an escargot: pan au raisin only got baffled looks from staff.
We were going aquariumming, but we passed St Paul's open door on the way, and were tempted in. It is magnificent; magnificent and unassuming in the way only grand churches seem to manage. St Mary's windows and her statue above the door at home are more moving to me, perhaps only from aquaintance; no, the first time I went in there I fell in love with at least two of the windows, and none of these here took me like that. Too high up, you can't study the faces. Only the one painting of Mary, and she's looking away, graceful and present only in her scene. But being in the building wasn't like being in any building I've been in, and I'll go there again. Plus, there's a very large poster saying "Welcome all refugees fully" on the outside wall, and on the way in the first language on the welcome sign is indegenous, I assume Boon Wurrung, and there's another sign saying in English, I don't remember exactly what it said, that white people have done terrible things here which have to be held in mind, and work has to be done. Which would make me want to like the building even if I didn't.
Next we were tempted by clothes shops. I got a bit stressed in the first shop because there were so many nice things, but it was queer-staffed, and Sam was very helpful and confusion-tolerant, and I ended up with a sea-green blouse and a polka dot red jersey and a lavender cardigan, all fine things in slots I wanted things for. And Sam found two lovely button up shirts in the second shop.
And next we actually made it to the aquarium! And there were jellyfish. And corals. And a huge huge jaggedy alligator that could perfectly well have decided to smash out the glass and make us lunch, it just chose not to. And penguins andd sharks and not as many seahorses as one could hope for but still some seahorses and turtles and a very large skink we could only see the back of and a green snake that was coiled around a branch and looked out at us very yellowly and never blinked because it didn't have eyelids.
Aquariums are weird. 
I ate an Australian mango by the river, and Sam had one of our apples and accidentally threw the other one of our apples in the river, but I got it back. He went home, and I walked down the bank on one side and got a bit freaked out and sat on a bench for a while, and then came back up the other side and saw this:


Which is part of an open ring of about eight rocks with different carvings, near a wonderful playground, with carved posts in the ground going away from it. I stayed there a while. The carvings are all lovely, but having had possums as the enemy my whole life at home there's something more powerful than just seeing a majestic eagle's face in seeing one laid out all beautiful and belonging. And then I ended up in NGV gallery by mistake, was captivated by a painting of the desert after rain. This was after wandering flummoxed by the multitude of things, and then in the indigenous section wandering flummoxed by the foreignness of the tradition. This one, oh, I've forgotten the artist's name, I must go back there too, it was beautiful, completely catch-your-eye. And I could think well, it looks like clouds over flat ground, and read the sideblurb and see that it was that, and then look at it for a while trying to get the symbols it mentioned into my head, the white dots over the dots mean water, and water does holds light like they do, and some of these patterns mean lightning, though I don't know which ones but maybe it's those ones, and this could mean that -- a very speculative understanding, but after that I could enjoy more of the paintings. The feeling is strange. It took me a semester's course on New Zealand history to start appreciating Maori art without fear of the things I'm missing. It's exciting to be scared like that again, but not pleasant. I wish they had prints of that painting.

I came home and woke Sam up to come down and let me in, because we only have one key. And we cuddled in bed and I am here at the table now, having eaten the last two of the timtams our air B&B person left out for us.

I feel like I need to write down everything just to understand what's going on. I still don't know how I feel about the aquarium: captive fish are basically terrifying, which I guess is why my best experiences were with the things without eyes and the thing that one can feel straightforwardly terrified of. Now having written that sentence I feel I can archive those memories without a pin. I'm a bit swimming in pins. I may be posting three times a day. Which seems a bit like experiencing through camera, but I came back to the apartment to rest, and this seems to be the rest I need, so. 

Tonight the fire show.