Ice Shall Cover the Desert

I recently spent three full days in Melbourne city with four adults supervising fifty-five students.  The entire experience was better than Nicki Minaj though, like any experience there were moments that were worse than that woman whose voice has such a knack for grinding my gears, like sand... sand just gets everywhere. 

I noticed some things, I witnessed some things and I took part in some things.  I will do my best to include only the most interesting in this post.

The first day was the longest day.  Up early for school and a long bus ride into the city, followed by the house rules of the hotel.  By 11:00 AM it felt like a full day had passed.  That tends to happen when you are directed, guided and instructed.  Even as a chaperon I felt exhausted with the amount of information pumped into my brain.  Perhaps the students weren't as affected, simply because they only had to worry about themselves (which they followed through with perfection, every one of them) and not a group of veins bursting- with-hormones teens hopped up on adventure and American television.

Regardless, the first day is a blur of shops, bedazzled clothing, shoes on sale for 130 dollars, the weight of guilt from a homeless shelter visit and the sights of a tower nearly 300 meters tall.  I may take time to unpack the visit to the homeless "shelter."  Really a church trying to figure things out and help people, though their methods are a bit unorthodox.  Later perhaps.

Day two went the quickest due largely in part to the evening activity of ice-skating. This was the time I let myself be a student rather than an adult, at least in shifting towards the front of the line to snag a pair of skates.  It wasn't until I sat down, my Canadian friend Byron suggested I traded them in for hockey skates, as he had done.  At the counter, the staff member of the largest ice skating complex in Melbourne (dare I say Australia!?) eyed me suspiciously, mustache and all, and asked if I was with the school.  "Why yes, I'm on staff" I replied with a shrug of my flannel draped shoulders.  More hesitation from behind the counter.  I couldn't see his hands.  They could have been fingering a silent alarm, or a sawed-off shotgun considering how nervous he looked.  "Hey kids!  Is this guy one of your teachers?!"  He shouted towards the dozen students in line.  A unanimous "yes." rang out and he ordered a skate grunt to retrieve a pair of 11's, while apologizing to me thrice with "...I just had to make sure, ya know..."

We also had to wear helmets.  As Byron said, "It just feels so right!"

I can tell you really want to know why I loved skating so much.  I still can only half skate backwards.  I still can only half stop.  I still am kind of fast and mostly stable.  Compared to the Australians, I was like Michael Gretzky, three time curling champion!  But even this was not the reason I will always remember skating in Australia.

I am in a country where I feel as though I mostly fit in.  I feel that people mostly like me, at the least they pretend to like me to my face.  While I was shredding that ice like a every Parmesan cheese grader advertises it can shred Parmesan cheese, I felt like everyone was back in Michigan with me, rather than me being in Australia with everyone else.  I didn't feel home, but it is the closest I have gotten to feeling at home in Australia, to even feeling known or understood.  The simple pleasure of moving on the ice (and oh when the Zamboni freshened the ice) carried me thousands of miles and made me fall in love like I haven't felt since...

The final day of the trip was the students "Amazing Race."  The other teachers and myself wandered, shopped and ate food.  For an hour and a half Byron and I sat in the garden at St. Patrick's Cathedral and asked students theological and philosophical questions as part of the race challenge. 

Here is an overhead shot of St. Patrick's

I will not include the questions here because that is a great way to start a string of arguments involving people wanting to be right.  If you want to hear what kind of questions an America exchange student and an ex-Canadian now Australian ex-youth pastor asked 9th grade students while sitting in the garden of a beautiful cathedral, you can ask me for them and I'll send them along, also including the answers and why your answers are wrong. "Dead wrong."

Tomorrow I dine on Crocodile Pie.

Cheers,
Melmoth

And let me tell you, that ice-skating was better than Nicki Minaj more so than anything else I have written about.