I was in front of my laptop at about 8.45pm on New Year’s Eve when I heard my name being yelled from outside my window. Sliding it open, I discovered Ivan literally right in between the birth of a storm, him breathlessly talking about a beautiful sight of a low-hanging moon.

“This is crazy,” I thought to myself, as I put on my three-quarter pants and rushed out with my camera and my keys jingling in my pocket. It was ghastly dark outside, with the wind slowly gathering strength and pace—a stark contrast to the blisteringly sunny and dry afternoon of about 35-37C that I partially doubted the news report earlier that Melbourne was predicted to be hit with a thunderstorm between 9pm and 1am, and as a result, the New Year’s Eve fireworks might be cancelled. I was afraid—there were brief flashes of lightning and the rain was pelting onto us as if the gods were casting eggs towards our direction, but having just read Joey’s rather inspirational post right before Ivan called me out, I’m struck with a brief moment of madness.

We walked towards the direction of the Queen Victoria Market—with me crouching occasionally when passing by trees for fear of being struck by lightning, as if that would help any—and then I saw it: a moon hanging the lowest possible I’ve ever seen in my time in Melbourne so far, radiating in its cool white gleam amidst the storm brewing above us, heading towards its direction.

I wasn’t able to capture it properly, sadly, as I only had my wide-angle lens with me and it wasn’t sufficient at all to snap it.

But it mesmerised me: there is a sense of exhilaration—perhaps the moon does drive men to madness—and then when Adi turned up with Ivan’s six-pack of beer in his bag, we all laughed and turned towards our place, the rain now at its utmost strength.

Quick and easy pictorial post of what I’ve been up to since it’s less than 24 hours 6 hours till New Year’s.

Saturday, 12th December 2009

I was holed up in the State Library using RMIT’s free WiFi when Ivan rang me up, asking if I’d like to go to join them with a friend of Kelvin’s to explore Monash. Being completely free and having less than several weeks left in Melbourne, I took up the invitation, but not before I had to rush back home to dump my laptop bag and bring along my DSLR—can never miss out an opportunity for photo ops, even if Ivan had asked me to hurry (if only I knew this earlier and not at the last minute) when I declined his suggestion of meeting up at Melbourne Central as I wanted to bring my camera with me.

On the Glen Waverley train.

Two Tuesdays ago (December 8th), Estee and I met up at Melbourne Central in the midst of the heavy rain. The downpour was an unpleasant setback as I was already getting sick, but I donned my waterproof jacket anyway (which proved to be only half-useful, as my trousers were soaked through) and walked to Flagstaff Station before hitching the free City Circle tram.

Don Don was still closed at the time (before 10am), so we ended up at Melbourne Central’s food court where I had mixed rice (with 3 dishes) for AUD$7.50. We quickly took the train to Studio 9 in Richmond to attend as a studio audience for a game show called Millionaire: Hot Seat, a modified version of the popular Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Thanks to a CouchSurfer, Krystel, who works there, I got ourselves two tickets and it was quite an experience considering that I’ve never been to a television studio before—not even in Malaysia.

Security’s rather strict: we had to leave our cameraphones, camera equipment, large umbrellas, etc with the security to be locked up away safely, plus we had to sign a contract stating things like, we’re not to divulge information pertaining to the show, etc. >_>

We were ushered in, and Krystel who was doubling up as an usher brought us to our seats at the back row (and promised to shift us to the front later). Turns out there was a funnyman who kept us entertained throughout with his outrageous, loud jokes, constantly poking fun at a few audiences, before the host, Eddie McGuire, appeared. The funnyman had also drilled into us to be excited and clapped loudly at some signals given by him, and apparently, there’d be some clap track inserted anyway—we just have to look as if we were clapping really loudly.

Most hilariously, when a contestant answered incorrectly, we all had to go, “Awwwwwww” collectively hahahaha.

And as they were recording 5 different episodes that day, we had to sit through 5 hours (an episode only lasts about 26 minutes actually) with some short intervals and breaks in between; we were also given candies, a bun, and a bottle of water too. We were shuffled around every episode so it would appear as if the audience was different as the camera angles were pretty much fixed.

In fact, it was quite cool for this opportunity to take a glimpse at how television programmes actually work—there were prompters for the host at two different angles, some cues for the host to say stuff like “we’ll be back after the break” or “we’ll be back after these national news”. We were also told to not look at each other or shout out answers if we knew the answers lol, and I pretty much don’t know how to answer any of them—even the $100,000 question that I thought I knew: “In 2001: A Space Odyssey, which spaceship does the computer HAL 3000 control?”. I shouldn’t have gotten this wrong as I’ve just watched it a few months ago and I thought it was Voyager, but turns out that the answer is Discovery, and the dude in his 30s walked away with AUD$100,000. Goddamn I’m envious.

Someone else won $50,000 but pretty much after the 3rd episode it went down the hill as people get booted out. It has a different format: there would be 5 people initially with $1,000,000 on the table, but as people get booted out, the money offered would diminish as well.

I was quite exhausted at the end of it all—either it was because I was falling sick, or watching 5 episodes of a game show in a row and clapping a lot, took a toll on me.

Either way, I did fall sick with a flu and a sore throat.

The following day, Estee came over to my place in the evening we discussed briefly our Great Ocean Road trip together, after which I brought her to the Suzuki Night Market (after noticing my newly bald Mauritius neighbour, who was incredibly talkative and bitched about not being able to get a job here as “they’re racist” lmao). The both of us eventually settled on some Persian food—the decision was made quickly as there were far too many people there.

As mentioned previously in my previous post, I’m going to deviate from chronicling my New Zealand trip—if anyone does read them anyway—due to severe time constraints. My earlier plans of gaming like crazy was replaced with a workaholic being, whose daily life here is serenely pleasing with nary an incident—and that, in itself, is its own doom. I go through a routine 12-6 period of working on HS in a library, 7 days a week—and all this assisted by the libraries’ opening hours. My uni’s library doesn’t open on the weekends after our exams, so this is conveniently replaced with a trip to the State Library of Victoria (these 4 words often echo in my head, in that man’s voice booming from the free City Circle Tram whenever it stops at Swanston St) which serves me well, practically a stone’s throw away from my uni’s Swanston St campus.

Since I’m putting my posts on the remainder of my NZ trip in an indefinite backlog, I’ll narrate instead from when I touched down in Melbourne from Christchurch onwards, on the 1st December on Tuesday morning.

My mind was encased in a strange numbing cocoon—I felt tired from my previous night’s somewhat unconventional bed (read: in an airport’s corridor, in a sleeping bag, while trying not to have my bags stolen), and my paranoia of getting through customs kicked in (god knows since when I’ve developed this strange fear), but only in a muted manner. Australian customs have a strict reputation that precedes it—I suppose watching Borders Security almost weekly with my Walsh St Boys has ingrained that fear, even though I wasn’t doing nor bringing in anything illegal.

I found this sign so hilarious I had to snap photos of it: “Channel 7 is filming its Borders Security TV show here today. Please contact the TV crew if you do not wish to be filmed.”. They had it posted at quite a number of places.