All Summer Long

“The elevator continued its impossibly slow ascent. Or at least I imagined it was ascent. There was no telling for sure: it was so slow that all sense of direction simply vanished. It could have been going down for all I knew, or maybe it wasn’t moving at all. But let’s just assume it was going up. Merely a guess. Maybe I’d gone up twelve stories, then down three. Maybe I’d circled the globe. How would I know?” Murakami – Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World

This quote came to mind as we were inducted, silently, by future elevator 935 feet into the skydeck of the Eureka building in Melbourne. A distant voice broke the silence to comfort us as the lift began to shake softly. “Do not be alarmed if you feel the building move. It can sway around 30 centimetres to either side. If you experience such movement, this is a normal occurrence. Please relax and enjoy.” So Nicola’s thinking holy snakes, the skyscraper tilts? This is the last thing she wants to hear.

But the ride that seemed to take forever was actually over in a matter of seconds, prolonged only by our anxiety. The lift carried us unknowingly at a speed of 9 metres per second, arriving at the 88th floor in 38 seconds. The doors opened onto a panoramic view of the city: its cathedrals, stadium, gardens, the Yarra River, all the way down to the ocean.

After spending time admiring the panorama and the highest postbox in the southern hemisphere, we took the same elevator down, which was packed cheek-to-cheek. One guy was bent over in the corner like a beetle holding his ears, no doubt because they had popped as ours had. He started to grimace and vibrate, and he was still doing this in the corner of the elevator after we had got out and the ride was over. We walked into the streets in a daze, feeling like our heads were about to explode.

Melbourne is cool like most big cities. Everything is vintage, craft or boutique. The coffee scene is massive, and you can get a great single origin coffee on practically any corner.  We hung out in a pinchos place in Fitzroy called Naked for Satan. We were given plastic animals in place of table numbers as we awaited the preparation of our Vietnamese sandwiches. We drank a schooner on a stool in some jazz bar. At one point, Nicola’s hair was even plaited naturally in an artisan wind.

We made our way to St Kilda’s beach by tram and made friends with a penguin hiding out in the rocks. Flash photography is prohibited, and you can be fined for disturbing the animals, so we made their acquaintance quietly through an opening below some ladders, so as not to scare them. The crowds of tourists separate from us were less forgiving and they’re now imprisoned with their cameras in ice. Looking back at the city from the beach or the edge of the pier, you can appreciate its skyline, more imposing than any that we have seen since leaving California. At the centre of it all is the Eureka building.