Homesick
I got to Canada on July 14. Today is October 27. Which, by my calculations, makes it 105 days. Or, 3 months and 13 days. Or, 15 weeks. Or, 2520 hours. Or, 151,200 minutes. Which is 9,072,000 seconds.
So I lied. They’re not my calculations at all; I just whacked the dates into a website and it spat all those numbers at me. The point of that exercise: that is exactly how long it took for my homesickness to kick in.
It came on quite suddenly and innocuously. It was actually a video on theage.com.au that did it. (Sorry, dear friends and family who are still in Australia.)
It was showing the new Fairfax building on the corner of Collins St and Spencer St that has just been finished. I worked just a few doors down from there and saw the foundations go in. It made my heart ache that I wasn’t there to see it complete. It looks like an awesome building. And just that one piece of architecture reminded me how freakin’ beautiful Melbourne is.
One thing that’s surprised me is how visually unappealing Toronto is. Sure, there are a couple of impressive buildings around the place, but there’s no cohesive beauty – at the risk of sounding biased, like you find in Melbourne.
Bias aside, I’m sure any impartial person could admit that Toronto is a little ugs. There’s not much pizzazz.
So I saw all these images of my home city, and I thought: I should be there. Why am I wasting my time here setting up a life? I should be there, my permanent home: setting myself up with a beachside apartment in Elwood, riding to work every day. Being a tourist in my own city, rather than a transient resident in this one.
It’s a very intense, hurried feeling – like you should be there right now because all of this is happening right now and you aren’t there right now.
Then it passed, as it always does, because I remind myself that Melbourne’s not going anywhere. It’ll still be there when the ugly beast that is Toronto chews me up and spits me out.
So I lied. They’re not my calculations at all; I just whacked the dates into a website and it spat all those numbers at me. The point of that exercise: that is exactly how long it took for my homesickness to kick in.
It came on quite suddenly and innocuously. It was actually a video on theage.com.au that did it. (Sorry, dear friends and family who are still in Australia.)
It was showing the new Fairfax building on the corner of Collins St and Spencer St that has just been finished. I worked just a few doors down from there and saw the foundations go in. It made my heart ache that I wasn’t there to see it complete. It looks like an awesome building. And just that one piece of architecture reminded me how freakin’ beautiful Melbourne is.
One thing that’s surprised me is how visually unappealing Toronto is. Sure, there are a couple of impressive buildings around the place, but there’s no cohesive beauty – at the risk of sounding biased, like you find in Melbourne.
Bias aside, I’m sure any impartial person could admit that Toronto is a little ugs. There’s not much pizzazz.
So I saw all these images of my home city, and I thought: I should be there. Why am I wasting my time here setting up a life? I should be there, my permanent home: setting myself up with a beachside apartment in Elwood, riding to work every day. Being a tourist in my own city, rather than a transient resident in this one.
It’s a very intense, hurried feeling – like you should be there right now because all of this is happening right now and you aren’t there right now.
Then it passed, as it always does, because I remind myself that Melbourne’s not going anywhere. It’ll still be there when the ugly beast that is Toronto chews me up and spits me out.
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