Travel

Vienna in the time of COVID – Chapter 16

/ jonathanrobb / 2 Comments

Here in Vienna, Spring is descending on us like a soothing balm. The days are getting longer, the temperature is getting warmer, birds are singing, flowers blooming, and we are stuck inside looking out, resenting all of it.

When the restrictions started, the weather was still cold and we had a week of icy winds and intermittent rain. We all smirked to ourselves and laid back on our couches, thinking “Stay inside all day? Okay, government, if you insist”. But now that the world has spun a little further along its orbit and the season is changing, this deal we struck is no longer sitting quite so comfortably.

With society stuck sitting in a timeout and the tempting outside and all the things we used to enjoy about it being denied to us, to me it comes down to how we use what we still have. It’s all about maximising on The Great Indoors. 

Alex and I share a one-bedroom, 65m2 apartment, equipped with the usual kitchen, bathroom, toilet, living room, and, to ensure we can still have a taste of fresh air and don’t go mad and attack each other after succumbing to claustrophobia, a balcony. But, when viewed from the right perspective, it can become so much more. Let me take you on a tour.

Let’s start with the couch. Ours is a three-person grey chaise lounge, which, should the situation call for it, can be converted into a bed. This situation arises when we have international guests staying with us for a stretch or we feel like being extra snuggly. Since the start of the lockdown, we have discovered just how versatile this seemingly simple piece of furniture can be. For the past three weeks our couch has functioned as a restaurant, La Patate de Canapé (it just translates to the Couch Potato, but sounds a lot classier in French). Here we dine on the most exquisite of foods, enjoying the comfortable homey atmosphere and sparkling conversation. The only downside is that this restaurant insists you cook your own food and clean up after you’re done. Fricken meta restaurants. 

The couch is also our theatre, where we sip on wine and indulge in the finest cinema that Netflix has to offer. It is an intellectual salon where we discuss and debate such hotbed topics as the global financial situation, America’s healthcare system, and whether I should shave off my beard (Alex is the most passionate about the latter and is strongly opposed). And, when necessary, the couch acts as a place where Alex can nod off for a spell. These power naps of hers can last anywhere between ten minutes and two hours. She never knows going in, so it’s always a gamble.

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But the functionality of our limited space doesn’t begin and end with the couch, we also have an entire living room floor which can transmogrify into an array of locations. This section of flooring, whose purpose is normally only to create enough distance from ourselves and the television, has become our morning yoga studio where our bodies stretch and bend (or don’t, depending on the pose). It acts as our gaming centre where we pit our word skills against one another across the arena of the scrabble board. I win about fifty percent of the time. I try not to let the fact that Alex speaks English as a second language ruin those victories. (We also used to play the card game “Spit” in our games centre, but it turns out I have a preternatural ability to win that game and that Alex has the preternatural ability to summon the rage of a berserker when losing, so we don’t talk about that game in our house anymore.) 

The floor can also be a massage parlour, a dance floor, and, when necessary, it acts as a place where Alex can nod off for a spell. Girl really loves her naps.

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Let me now take you through to the water closet, and on this part of the tour I must ask that you refrain from using flash photography. The porcelain throne is a wonderful place to get some me-time, offering a quiet getaway where one can delve into a book, catch up on the rest of the world with a good scroll through instagram, finally answer those messages from friends and family you’ve been meaning to get to, or just sit in the silence with your thoughts for a while. And, if the situation calls for it, eliminate bodily waste. 

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With a little creativity, the right perspective, and a dash of quarantine-induced madness, our humble abode has the potential to become anything we need it to be. I recommend you take the time to explore the mysteries and see the sights of your own Great Indoors while we all wait for the world to spin a little further in its orbit to that point in the future where we are free to roam outside again together.

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Tomorrow: Art.

Vienna in the time of COVID – Chapter 12

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For those of you who may be unaware, my wife is Austrian, and therefore part of the contractual obligation to dating and ultimately marrying her was that I learn German. This prospect was initially exciting as it meant I had a valid reason to learn a second language I would actually use (apparently saying “kop-khun-krub” to the hotel staff in Thailand doesn’t count).

What I didn’t realise and therefore didn’t factor into the whole equation was how much having a strong grasp of a language empowers a person in their daily life. When it comes to English, it’s not going too far to say that I have a passing competence in its use and don’t really give a second thought to composing emails, phoning a stranger, or writing long-winded blogs about my life. 

But learning German snatched me right back to the start and suddenly, at thirty, I was having to learn everything again. This is no easy thing. Having to stand in a bakery and ask your wife to order you the donut like a kid having a day out with Mum is a humbling thing. I have been guilty of listening to our four year old nephew, Lorenz, going on about his favourite TV show and feeling flush with jealousy at his proficient German skills. I have sat and read children’s books with Lorenz and been suffused with pride that I could read the whole book. A book aimed at four year olds. Trust me, friends, learning a language will keep you modest. 

But, given that I chose to move to this country where the native tongue is German, learn I must. And given that I now find myself locked indoors with my wife who has nowhere to run when I ask her questions about German semantics, what better time is there to continue to build my language skills. And, lastly, as teaching what you’ve learnt is an excellent way to consolidate information, and given that you’re also locked in your homes and have nowhere to run, I thought I’d teach you all some German nouns to occupy your minds until the world turns back on again. You lucky, lucky things.

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One of the first things you’ll notice is that German is a very literal language. As a novice, this facet is advantageous as the mental connections required to actually get a word to stick to the inside of your brain are already there. Let me give you an example to show what I mean. 

Say you’re an Australian visiting Austria in the winter and you discover that winter in Austria is rather cold, which is to say extremely bloody cold to an Australian to whom winter usually means wearing a jumper with the sleeves rolled down. You realise as you wander through a Christmas market that you are putting yourself at serious risk of frostbite and so set out to buy some appropriate accessories. You wish to let the shop assistant know you would like to purchase some gloves but can’t remember the German word. You can work through the following association exercise to quickly and easily arrive at the right word:

“Gloves. What are they really? Why nothing more than shoes one wears on one’s hands. In essence, they are just a pair of hand shoes.”
Gloves = hand shoes = Handschuhe.

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Now, say you are a Franz Joseph and Sissi nut (who isn’t, am I right?) and you are keen to see Sissi’s zoo. You arrive at the Vienna zoo and are suddenly exposed to an assortment of animals which you need to identify using only the German names. A daunting task, no doubt, but armed with the word for animal, “Tier”, German has you covered. Just walk through these logical and natural steps and you’ll soon find yourself speaking like a native.

“The sloth. It’s barely moving. My god, they are lazy, aren’t they? I heard they only come down out of their trees once a week to poop and they can lose a third of their body weight when they do finally defecate. Nothing more than just a lazy, lazy animal.”
Sloth = lazy animal = Faultier.

Faultier

“No way, the platypus. Cute little thing. Mad to think that it’s a mammal with a beak. Yep, that beak is a key distinctive feature of the platypus. It’s like some sort of beak animal.”
Platypus = beak animal = Schnabeltier.

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“Check out the hippopotamus. Boy, are they big. Anyone else get the urge to ride them? Just saddle up and swim off into the horizon? I’ve always said they’re basically a horse. But, like, one that lives in the river. You know, like a river horse.”
Hippopotamus = river horse = Flusspferd. 

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Next, maybe, you venture into the mountains for a hike and while doing so discover the ancient remains of a hiker. You call the police and are trying to explain that you found the corpse when tripping over the skull, only, and hasn’t this happened to us all, you can’t remember the word for skull! Not a worry, just put one logical foot in front of the other and you’ll soon be arriving at the correct answer.
“Ooh, it’s like a head. Only a creepy head. One that is, like, proper dead. Like a creepy dead head.”
Skull = dead head = Totenkopf.

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Lastly, let’s pretend you’ve had a lovely night out on the town and finished it off by getting seduced by a local (it happens, trust me. They’re very seductive, these Austrians. They invite you over to their country and the next thing you know you’re married to one of them). The next morning you realise that in your passion you failed to use any contraceptive products. You find the nearest Apotheke (pharmacy) and need to ask the pharmacist for the morning after pill. But what’s the word? Easy, just think to yourself:
“Anti-baby pills”. And that’s it. This one’s pretty self-explanatory.
Antibabypillen = anti baby pills = the morning after pill.

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It is no small thing taking on the learning of a new language and it requires accepting that you have to leave your ego at the door and look foolish from time to time. But through creating associations and using the literal nature of the German language to your advantage, soon you too could be talking as fluent as a four year old. 

You’re stuck indoors, what else are you gonna do?

Tomorrow: Cuisine.

2018/19

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2018 was one for the books.

This appropriate phrase was first uttered by my brother as he, his fiancée, myself and my then-fiancée, sat in an AirBnB in New Zealand, sharing a drink and fervently wishing the clingy and slightly creepy owner of the place wouldn’t come down to his lower storey where we were residing and interrupt us again. At the time the statement was more of a prediction as 2018 had yet to happen, but the plans were laid out before us and all signs indicated that it would indeed be a year for the books. My brother was not wrong.

Of course, not everything went to plan.

I referenced my partner as “then-fiancée” because in the past year she transition from my fiancee to my wife. That was part of the plan. At the time of writing this we’ve been married for four months, but do not live together. Not even in the same country, in fact. That is the part that did not go to plan.

But I should start from the start.

 

The first half of 2018 continued as my previous few years had. I toiled in London, working stupid hours as a Rapid Response nurse, while Alex continued to labour away in her office job in Vienna. Between these activities we also planned a wedding, and by we, I mean Alex. I contributed where I could and all decisions were reached as a team, but due to the language barrier, and distance barrier, the lioness’s share of the work fell on Alex’s shoulders. She somehow managed to balance this weight of work and produced spectacular results, both professionally and extracurricularly, and for this I will be forever grateful. Luckily for me, I am now legally bonded to her and so have a lifetime to repay her kindness.

This routine continued up until July when two best friends came knocking and the first of those well laid plans for a year worthy to be one for the books was enacted. My twin brother, Damian, and his fiancée, Holly, had taken three months of leave to spend a chunk of time with us, attend our wedding, and cross as much of Europe as they could in the process. They started with Austria, and I took two weeks off to revel in their company while simultaneously completing a two-week intensive German language course. Because what fun time isn’t improved by completing a two-week intensive German language course.

Having my people come to a place they had only previously visited via video chat was like putting the last jigsaw puzzle piece in the picture that was my new home. Despite my continued residence in London, Alex’s apartment was my true home on this side of the planet, and having Damian and Holly physically present gave it a solidity, turning my European fantasy into reality.

They saw the sights and the city, and thankfully for me fell in love with it all as much as I had. But the best times we spent together were dinners around the dining table, movie nights, picnics by the river and drinks on the balcony. Domestic things not unique to Vienna, and therefore all the more cherishable because it wasn’t the location that made it special but the company.

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Damian and Holly ventured on into forests and mountains, and for a brief period life resumed its normal rhythms. Alex and I added the extra task of collecting various documents for my residency in Austria amongst work and wedding planning, each of us reaching out to assorted governmental bodies for an equally assorted list of paperwork. Each of us had to prove identities, incomes, and criminal histories, the latter of which we thankfully had none. We hoarded these documents like a squirrel hoards nuts, ready for the day we acquired the final piece of paperwork, the marriage certificate, and could put them all into action.

Then family descended upon Vienna. If Damian and Holly gave my new home solidity, then having my brother and his family, my parents and my cousin and his partner, and Damian and Holly back again, all together in the same four walls made it as firm as a foundation. Which only made sense, as the foundation of my life is exactly what all these people are.

Life became wedding centric and after bbqs and crafternoons, buck’s nights and venue decorating, the day came and Alex and I were saturated in love for each other and from our community of family and friends. The rain pushed away, sunlight poured down on us, and we had a ridiculously picture perfect wedding day, the kind you see in wedding magazines, roll your eyes at and mutter “as if.” Yeah, we were those people.

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After soaking up as much family time as possible, Alex and I ran away to Greece to get to know one another as husband and wife, while my family ventured off into unknown parts of Austria and then on into wider Europe. The year once again was living up to its reputation.

To add to the book-worthy status, 2018 also saw my beautiful sister, Angela, have her first child, providing me with an adorable new nephew by the name of Eli. For the first time in years, all of my immediate family was off from work, either through annual leave or maternity leave, and all of us were adventuring. Our family thread of messages became clogged with photos of some of the most stunning and dramatic parts of central and eastern Europe. I watched my sister be a mother through videos provided by her fiance, Ben, and met my cherub of a nephew this way. I saw my other nephew and niece, Ella and Harry, casually take to planes, exotic landscapes, and new languages and cultures as if it was just another Wednesday, getting on with it and smiling all the way with the adaptability of kids. My ongoing video messages with my older brother, Matt, became a lot more interesting as the backgrounds behind our heads transition from the same tired bedroom settings to Santorini beaches and old beautiful cities.

 

Eventually this exotic period had to end, and Alex and I headed back to reality, jetting from the Greek Islands to Vienna for too few days before I had to return to London. Despite our new status as man and wife, that alone didn’t give us any rights to reside together, and so I had to say goodbye to my bride. After three years of a long-distance relationship we are sadly well-practiced at these goodbyes, but doing it as a newly married couple came like a punch to the gut, and the wedding high evaporated as I sat on a plane and took off from the place I really wanted to be.

I submitted my application for residency at the Austrian embassy in London the next day, slipping in amongst the mountain of other documents the all important marriage certificate stating I belonged to Alex and she to me, and therefore it would be nice if we could be together for our mutual ownership. I was told it would be approximately three months until I got any sort of response, and so I returned home and picked up my routine of work, trying hard to pretend every day wasn’t a small torture of missing my wife and waiting for an email that would say I was allowed to be with her.

After about a month this wait was briefly paused when a letter arrived in Alex’s mailbox, but it was only to ask for even more documentation. Alex had queried with three different officials if the police check I provided needed be from the UK where I’d resided for the past three years, or from Australia, where I had resided for the previous twenty-eight years. All three officials scoffed and said they didn’t care where I had lived, only where I did live, and that a UK police check was all that was necessary, please and thank you.

As I’m sure you’ve already guessed, that letter in Alex’s mailbox stated in no uncertain terms that we had failed to provide an Australian police check, and that we needed to do so in a timeframe of eight days. Apparently they hadn’t figured that postage time alone to get the document from Australia to Austria would exceed our allotted time, not to mention the collection of yet more documents and processing time required for the Australian government to run my background check and determine I was not a criminal. Alex contacted the residency office and explained the situation, and they very reluctantly granted us a bit more time, huffing all the while as if the delay was our fault and we were lucky to be getting the extension. How generous of them.

We resubmitted and the wait began again.

Thankfully, they arduous process was interrupted by the wedding of my best friends, the aforementioned Damian and Holly. The distraction was welcomed, and I’m sure they timed their wedding purely to give us something else to think about. They’re good like that.

Alex and I boarded a plane and flew away from our distance and our problems for a time, swapping winter for summer, her home country for mine, and landed in Australia and sunshine, and the always warm company of my family.

The next three weeks saw us visiting family and friends with the speed and frenzy of speed-daters, and amongst it all we geared up for the second wedding of the season. We also had a small sewage problem that constituted of the contents of the toilet bubbling up on the soon-to-be newlywed’s front lawn, that was ultimately remedied by diggers and the loss of the toilet the day before the wedding.

Despite this small hiccup, Damian and Holly’s wedding was a thing of beauty. Once again, the clouds rolled away, literally last-minute as the groom and I eyed the dark dripping sky on our way to the park where the wedding was to be held, a pocket of sunlight opening up and drenching the clearing with sunlight so warm a groomsman had to sit down mid-ceremony to avoid fainting. The pre-ceremony whiskey, beer, and lack of water may have also contributed to his condition.

Damian and Holly’s story was said for the benefit of the crowd and they exchanged vows so honest, so loving, so real, so silly, so thoughtful and so aptly them that there was not a dry eye in the garden, the eyes of yours truly amongst them.

The party kicked off and I danced with my family, and celebrated my two best friends legally bonding themselves to one another, and drank and laughed and sang too loud and all the good things you can do when life for the moment is just about love and nothing else. In short, the wedding was kick-ass and book-worthy.

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The three weeks passed too quickly and Alex and I found ourselves morosely packing suitcases for the return home, buzzed with the high of the wedding, but sad to be leaving when we’d just gotten into the holiday rhythms. The parting was as hard as ever, and I shed tears with my family, both happy and sad for it to hurt because as least it meant I was so lucky as to have a community who loved me and whom I loved that the distance mattered so greatly.

But I am doubly lucky, and upon touchdown we were greeted but the second community in our lives and soon celebrated Christmas with the Vienna side of our widespread family.

Throughout it all, despite my best efforts, my heart still raced every time my phone pinged announcing I had a new email. Logically I had reasoned that I wouldn’t get a response about my Austrian residency until the new year, despite the fact that the eighteenth of December marked the three-month anniversary of when the application was submitted. But every email was nothing of note, and at the time of writing this no decision has yet to be reached.

 

Which brings us back to where I started. As demonstrated, my brother did indeed prophesise correctly and 2018 was undisputedly one for the books.

But, sadly, the continued dual lodging of Alex and myself also demonstrates that not everything went to plan.

I fly back to London tomorrow, on the second of January, 2019, once again saying goodbye to my wife for a period of time. I don’t know what 2019 will hold, when residency will come and Alex and I can finally start building our life together under the same roof. I’m not setting dates in mind or making plans because it hurts too much when things don’t go according to those plans. But I know however the dust settles, 2019 will contain more family, and laughter, and problems, and solutions, and Alex, and that with our widespread community we’ll do everything we can to make 2019 one for the books.

That’s all any of us can ever do with a year.

2017/18

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2017 was an exhausting year.

It was a year that found me working more hours per week than I ever thought I would. Twelve-hour days became the norm, bookended with hour long bus rides through the suburbs of London, crawling my way north over the Thames and back again, german audio courses filling my ears for the morning journey, and Alex’s voice filling them for the return trip home.

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I went in and out of a thousand patient’s homes, into apartments of squalor and into estates so grand they could have housed five families instead of the single rich elderly resident that they did. I took endless blood pressures, felt an infinity of pulses, and inserted blessedly few suppositories. Maybe around four. Not too bad, really.

It was a year that found me spending more time away from my loved ones than in any other period to date. I was away from Australia for thirteen months, and saw my partner for only three and a half days of every fortnight. I was either working or in my tiny bedroom in Tooting, where my primary activities were eating, skyping and sleeping.

It was a year where the news reports seemed determined to bend us and bow us, to convince us the world was a doomed place being run by morons and bigots. The endless stream of click-bait fed us a diet of hopelessness and negativity, and sapped already depleting reservoirs.

It was a taxing year, certainly, but don’t believe it all, because 2017 was also an exhilarating year.

It was a year that saw my brother, Damian, become engaged to his best friend, Holly. It was a year where, in an uncharacteristic display of twinliness, I also became engaged to my best friend.

My voice quavered and my hands shook, and I asked my lady a question and she gave me a lifetime of happiness by answering in the affirmative. This happiness commenced almost immediately when, at four o’clock in the morning, with both of us too juiced up with adrenaline to sleep, we sat in bed, watched TV, and ate potato chips. Perfect wife material, my friends.

It was a year that contained a visit from my parents who crossed oceans and continents to meet me, my new fiancée, and my new fiancée’s parents, in Greece. The six of us soaked in the sun and the sea of the Mediterranean, ate our body’s weight in delicious food, and shared in the excitement of the coming nuptials.

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We explored the city of Vienna, my second home, and I journeyed with my parents across the United Kingdom. My previously isolated existence was suddenly occupied, and places and streets and homes that had been segregated from my former life became infused with the flavour of family. Those lonely locations in London now carried memories of Mum and Dad, causing the loneliness to have a harder time taking hold.

The year contained adventuring as the three of us road-tripped, dipping into the wildness of the Scottish highlands and tracking the coastline of Northern Ireland. We explored the isle of Skye, trekking on foot into the beauty and fierceness of the land, standing at the crest of the Old Man of Storr and whooping into the wind that tried to uproot us from the rocky soil.

 

It was a year where I shared texts and photos and videos with my older brother, Matthew, and spoke to my sister, Angela, through computers and phones, and realised I wasn’t as cut off as I imagined myself to be.

It was an exhausting year, and an exhilarating one, and one that helped highlight the significance of each of these attributes. Because although the adventuring was eye-opening and inspiring, and it was for the adventuring that I originally stepped out of my house in Ardeer and trotted off to Europe, it was the more subdued moments that really made my year worthwhile.

It was weekends with Alex, chatting over coffee or making meals together, or doing nothing at all but sitting on the couch and watching TV, that made the hours of work slip from my shoulders.

It was sitting with Mum and Dad in an irish pub or an Airbnb kitchen and having a beer or a cup of tea, and talking as if the miles that had previously separated us and the months spent physically apart were a brief nuisance already evaporating from our memories.

It was seeing my family’s faces in my laptop and mobile, and laughing like we always do until I could have sworn they were in the room with me, our conversation creating a temporary bubble where the laws of time and space were suspended, that punctured my isolation and deflated it.

It was all these interactions, these small and intimate moments amongst the labour of work and the highs of adventuring, that made the external stressors of the rest of the world that usually hammered at my attention become nothing more than the sound of rain falling somewhere outside while I was tucked up warm indoors.

2017 exhausted me, but it also exhilarated me to learn that what I really want from my life is these quieter moments, moments with Alex, conversations with my siblings, tea with my parents. Because while the adventuring is great, and standing on a mountain in Scotland laughing and screaming into the wind will have your adrenaline racing, it’s the getting warm and dry at the bottom with someone you love that gives it significance.

So bring on 2018, a year where I will marry the woman I love and build a life with her. A year where, by the end of it, I will no longer be torn between two cities, but will finally have a home in Vienna. A year where I’ll celebrate two weddings with my family, and see my brother marry his best friend.

A year where I’ll work less, and probably adventure less, but instead make time for the quiet moments that make both things worthwhile.

THE AUSTRALIAN GOOD-WILL MISSION – PART 2

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Alex’s birthday took place in April, and I had been determined to give her a memorable gift. During my initial visit to Vienna, but far enough in that all the feelings had started to bud where Alex was concerned, Alex had mentioned that for her previous birthday her work colleagues had given her a huge helium balloon. The glee in her face indicated to me that balloon + Alex = happy, and I therefore decided to give her the biggest balloon anyone had ever given her.

This I accomplished in the form of a hot-air balloon ride.

Well, truth-be-told, this I accomplished in the much less climatic gift of a home-made voucher for a hot-air ballon ride. Part of the gift was that she could choose the location of the flight, and given that we frequently moved between London and Vienna, with the odd side trip to Greece and Prague, she had her choice of location. At the time of said gift-giving, we had already begun preparations for our Australian sojourn, and so she decided to vote for the city that had helped shaped the person she loved (me).

We both agreed that, given the fickle nature of Melbourne weather, we’d try and take the hot-air balloon ride as soon as possible to avoid the risk of missing out altogether, and so in the week leading up to our departure, I went about finalising the date of the flight. We landed on the Saturday and thought we should have recovered enough from the day-long ordeal by Monday in order to take to the air again.

Unfortunately, the day before leaving for the airport, the coordinators of the flight informed me that the weather for Monday didn’t look good, and that, in fact, the weather for the rest of the week wasn’t looking good either. There was one ray of sunlight, however (metaphorically and literally):  Sunday was clear. Even though we knew we’d be exhausted from our hemispherical commute, we thought fuck it, and booked it in.

So, after touching down at five pm Saturday, jet-lagged and generally fatigued from the energy it takes to cram yourself into airline chairs for twenty-three hours, we woke up at four am Sunday and drove into the fine city of Melbourne to see it from the air.

This was Alex’s first taste of Melbourne, and was rather anti-climatic given the sun was not yet up  and we were we just driving through dimly-lit suburbia. She was polite enough however to ohh and ahh as I pointed out landmarks from my life despite the fact that most of it couldn’t be seen at this time in the morning.

We wove into the heart of the CBD, parked, and walked the final stretch down Flinders Lane to the Grand Hyatt, the meeting point. There we met some of our fellow aviators, a young couple from Sydney, the male of the pair being kind enough to ask if we’d heard about the hot-air balloon crash that morning in Florida. Tactful. It kind of killed the conversation.

Once all had gathered, we were loaded into a van and driven to our take-off site — the park behind the Royal Children’s Hospital. We all assisted in dismounting the balloon and basket from the trailer and unrolling the expanse of nylon that was going to pull us up and above the city. The pilot set up a giant fan and directed air into the material, and quickly followed it with what we’d all come to see: fire.

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This was literally the combination of ingredients that would levitate us into the sky — air and fire — proving that the hot-air balloon truly lives up to its name.

The limp and flaccid stretch of nylon slowly engorged with air and fire, and eventually rose to stiff attention above us to blot out the sky. (If you found an erection metaphor in that previous sentence then that was your doing, not mine. I was just describing the process of inflating a balloon. Shame on you.)

We all piled into the basket, that, while big, felt cramped with the ten of us squeezed in to create the smallest mosh pit ever. The pilot also boarded, released a few eruptions of flame up into the cavernous balloon, and after a few bumps along the grass, the impossible happened and we floated off the ground.

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The first two minutes involved clinging as tightly to the basket edges as my fingers would allow, and trying desperately to keep every muscle in my body perfectly still and balanced in case any movement tipped the basket and had us all tumbling out. My brain avidly pointed out that the ground was going away, and that we liked the ground, and that maybe that was a safer place to be than suspended in wicker underneath gouts of fire and a thin nylon sheet.

Alex was a pro. Despite the near-panic attack induced by looking at photos on the company’s website a month earlier, she calmly pivoted around, capturing the miracle of drifting from the ground and lazily weaving between the tips of skyscrapers. A few “Oh boy!”s were whispered through pursed lips, and the odd chuckle tinged with just the tiniest hit of mania slipped out, but otherwise she was totally calm.

After five minutes of my brain alerting me again and again that the ground had gone, the lack of any actual harm and the apparent lack of threat despite the unusual location we found ourselves in soothed the flight-or-fight in me enough to for it to curl up in the back of my skull and enjoy the view.

And what a view. We headed straight over the heart of the city, and Melbourne was laid out like the most detailed of maps, complete with toy-trains shooting out across tiny rails, minute figures of people strolling the pencil thin footpaths, and the building stretching up to meet us, suspended there above it all. If you are impressed by the satellite feature on google maps, just know you haven’t seen anything yet.

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Eventually the fear disappeared so completely that we leaned over the basket’s edges, looking down on the patchwork of homes, pools, and footballs ovals that made up the suburbia as we drifted away from the city, taking the winds blowing South-East. Someone made the comment that we were lucky to have such a smooth flight, and the pilot remarked that all flights were smooth. We were never stationary, and so never offered resistance to the breeze, and we had no form of propellent of our own to drive us through the air currents and cause turbulence. We were a feather caught in the breeze, a leaf drifting down a river, and being part of the movement made it feel as if we were still while the world scrolled below us. It turns out there’s some perks to going with the flow — there’s probably a lesson in there somewhere.

Eventually we made our way to the Moorabbin airport where, upon descending, out pilot calmly informed us that we were going fast enough that our basket would tip on landing. We absorbed his words, fought down a bubble of panic, and giggled nervously, because what else do you do when someone tells you your hot-air balloon would crash land.

It turns out this is a rather normal occurrence and we adopted the brace position we had been taught, bending our knees and sandwiching ourselves between stands of wicker. The edge of the basket kissed the ground, trundled along for a while, then the whole thing slowly and elegantly tipped until we settled on our backs in the grass. It was nice to lay there next to Alex, grass blades tickling my cheek, safely back on solid ground. The strangers crammed around us I could have done without.

Euphoric from the spectacle we had just partaken in, we helped pack away the balloon, now once again shrivelled and flaccid, its work done for the day and all air ejaculated from its insides (keep it clean, people). We were then driven back to the Grand Hyatt, given glasses of sparkling wine as is customary, and gorged ourselves on the lavish buffet breakfast offered by the hotel.

As we retraced out steps down Flinders Land and back to the car, walking through the city that only an hour before we had floated above,we were greeted with one last sight. Alex, being without her glasses, squinted as we approached the edge of a street, emerging out of buildings to a small park on the opposite street, and asked, “What kind of dog is that?”

It was a ram. In Melbourne. Just chewing grass beside the skyscrapers.

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The worst part was nobody else was acting like it was a weird thing. I could envision Alex’s phone call back home, her family asking her impression of Melbourne and her response, “It’s nice and all, but they just have livestock roaming through the streets.”

I tried to assure her this was completely unusual, and she seemed convinced. Mostly.

So the birthday gift, and Alex’s first experience of Melbourne, had been a success, and we’d only be in the country for nineteen hours.

Luckily, there was plenty more to come.