Summer in Melbourne

The most obvious difference between Winter and Summer in Melbourne is that physically stimulating sight of people in various stages of undress all around you in Summer! Young, old, men, women, all different colours of people on the streets, in the shops, on the trams all going about their business dressed for comfort and keeping cool.

Yesterday was 37 degrees.

Hot, humid, sweaty with stifling heat swirling around you with a vengeance that makes you wonder how a place this hot can be so cold in Winter.

Across the aisles from where I sat was a Chinese sprawled across four seats (arms & legs akimbo!) fast asleep from the possible effects of either drink or drug. He was either on his way to T’ien or already there!

Across the seat from me sat this young girl in black with high platform shoes  – not yet a lady – GOTHIC with piercing – shiny silver plated hoop jewellery dangling from her tongue, her lips, her nose, her eyebrows, her ears with matching jewellery everywhere you look upon her – a physically beautiful girl – but let down by her glazed eyes that gazes into nothing. As much as every instinct in me wanted to look at her my common sense tells me to look elsewhere lest I am perceived to be invading her obvious need to left alone in her own world. What passes through my mind is where she will find herself in a few years time – dead before her time?

At the next stop a shirtless teen joined us in the already crowded Tram. Everybody around him moved away ever so slightly. Nobody wants to rub shoulders with a sweaty shirtless kid who obviously did not understand the need to use deodorant on a hot Melbourne summer day. We do!

All the young nubile girls in short skimpy or transparent billowy skirts are either sensibly walking around in the air conditioned department stores or taking taxis to where they are going to or from where they are coming from. No eye candy for us today.

I like the heat and the liberating feeling of using a singlet to move around in. As much as I would rather use shorts I know that at 65 years of age I no longer have the legs to pull of using them in a place where I am a foreigner! An old man with white hair in shorts is NOT a pretty sight!

In KL shorts are my preferred attire any time of the day. At home it is always sarongs but the last of the four sarongs I brought over to Oz four years back from KL has now disintegrated – so no more sarongs. I have been looking around for a shop that sells them but no luck so far. Can anybody in Melbourne help me on this? And I do not want to pay Aud $20 for one! Cheap cheap lah……that’s the Malaysian in me lah!