based on a true story

It was some time after dinner on a Sunday evening three months in the past, and I was at a bar in Melbourne, Australia. There was a stack of postcards next to me which I was filling out, and the cocktail in front of me was very good. I had already decided for myself that I had a crush on this city, the way one does when a relationship is new and shiny, and the only facets one can see are the lovely and charming ones. It had been a while since I was giddy about something, and this was an emotion that I was savoring. I may have also been a bit drunk.

Work had sent three of us out there, to shake hands with our new Australian clients and talk them into the future. It hadn't just been meetings, but also dinners and late night catchups with everyone back in the US. Sunday was the first day in six that I had to myself, and while there was work to be done, none of it had to be done in the hotel. So I roamed, starting at a ridiculously uber cafe¹ in Fitzroy for a breakfast of braised pork cheeks with a fried egg and an Indian roti² and had a day with artist's markets, dutch bicycles, beachfront promenades, riverside parks and curious bookstores, interspersed with meals in places with free Wi-Fi so I could be That Guy with the Laptop for a while. By the end of the evening, I found myself at the Everleigh, a craft cocktail bar founded by alums from Milk & Honey.

You'll find that pattern of "such-and-such restaurant/shop/tattoo parlor opened by Australians who worked somewhere else" is fairly common. It's a cultural given that every young middle-class Australian adult must go out into the world, travel, and come back with having learned something. Couple that with a genuinely open and inviting immigration policy and you have cities that buzz with energy and optimism, from people who mingle with each other because they've chosen to be there and not just because they were trapped there by birth or circumstance.

Of course, three months is enough distance for a crush to fade. In retrospect, one can probably say similar things for San Francisco or London and hold these cities up as paragons of cosmopolitan diversity, but ignore the provincialism that exists in the less dynamic parts of the country. But I never got to know Australia long enough to be disappointed with it, and my memories have the glow of a short affair started in excitement and ended before the novelty began to fade.

The bar manager came up to me as I was most of my way through my postcards, and she commented on how nice it was that I was writing these out. "It's so rare to get a piece of real correspondence nowadays. It's all just bills."

I think about that now as I write holiday cards. I haven't done cards in a while, but I wanted to keep up the habit of writing to friends. And there are emotions to be savored.

¹ It is perhaps not an understatement to say that almost all coffee in Melbourne is ridiculously uber. Portland, San Francisco, Paris, Rome -- they can all make whatever claims that they want. None of them have the sheer enthusiasm that the average Melburnian has for a cup of espresso. Or French Press. Or siphon filter. It's a little crazy.

² Modern Australian cooking is all about taking the best bits of Chinese, Indian and British cooking and generating something awesome from the alchemy. If that's just a precursor for the way the rest of the culture will evolve over time, then I'm all for it.