A Trip to Visit A Friend - or, Friday the Thirteenth is So Not Unlucky

My friend Nova, who has spent the past year in Japan, has come back to Australia for a month to catch up with family and friends (and also attend to important medical appointments). I had the day off on Friday, so I went up to Melbourne to visit her. The last time I went up to the city was when we went to see the Game On exhibition at ACMI, waay back in March last year. If the exhibition ever comes your way, go and see it if video games are your thing!

I met up with her at Flinders Street, and caught the train back down the line to Clayton Monash Uni so she could get the results of her, um, "ladies' appointment". We had a very interesting conversation about the important medical checkups that the various sexes and ages have to suffer, over a light lunch... appetizing subject matter, you could imagine.
They have an Asian grocery there too, so we went in there to get something to drink. While there, I found some of the soft drinks that are sealed with a marble instead of the screw cap. I also found a can of this:

We haven't tried it yet, but Krys seems to think it's citrus flavoured. God, I would hope so!

After we finished our meal, Nova took me over to the Manga Library where she is a member of staff. Here's a picture of part of the library. It's not a big room, but it holds about 7,000 books. Here is Nova pretending to read something in Manganese for the purposes of my photo:

I got to meet some of her lovely friends and personally, I'm not sure if Kat and Nova are two different people; has anyone ever seen them both in the same room? I have, and I'm still not entirely convinced, read some English-language manga... and then I bought some souvenirs:

The bookmark and badges were made by the staff members (Nova designed the pirate-robot and ninja-zombie badges) and we really like them!
Att: staff - make sure you have more stuff for me to buy next time I come over! =)

I sat and read books while Nova helped out with their cataloguing system (good luck with that, btw!) and we realised that we'd spent about three hours there, and thought, "oops! there's probably other things we could be doing!"
So we went back to the city proper, and I had a look through JB Hi-Fi for some new music and videos. I found "Interstella 5555", "All Together Now" and "Beatles Anthology 2", all of which I'd been planning to buy but couldn't find anywhere else. Happy! I'm listening to the last one as I'm typing this.

Then we walked back to the station, but called into a clothing shop along the way, where we both bought a couple of T-shirts Nova refused to let me buy her some, even though I really could afford to do so! hey, that's the last time I try to buy her an extra birthday present..., and then we called into Hungry Jack's for a meal. We also lamented the fact that that particular branch of HJ's had stopped their "Free Drink Top-Up" policy, as it was really warm that day.

We still had about an hour to kill before my train arrived, so we went to Fed Square to see if the Ian Potter Gallery was still open it wasn't. ACMI was also closed for the day. We wound up sitting in the courtyard between the buildings chatting and enjoying the last of the sun:

And suddenly, it was time to go home!
The train ride back was exhausting. Someone on the train spent most of the trip complaining that he wasn't allowed to have a drink of beer and by the sounds of it he'd already had a few. I felt bad for him, though, because by the sounds of it he'd been fighting some of the fires across the state, and he would have been exhausted by that stage...

Things I've Lurnded from this trip:

1. Nova has has her ears pierced for the first time! This was prompted entirely by a gift of earrings for her 30th. She had actually only had the procedure done the day before, and she kept acccidentally brushing her earlobes and going "ow!"
2. Reading manga books "back-to-front" is disorienting, but gets easier with practice. No pun intended.
   
3. You can't drink BYO alcohol on public transport.
4. You can't drink BYO alcohol on public transport.
5. Nope - you still can't drink BYO alcohol on public transport.
6. Japan has some very strange flavoured Kit Kats -

but that's the subject of my next post! Stay tuned!