It's two weeks since I came to Brisbane.
Two weeks ago I revisited the joy of waiting to go somewhere accompanied by a small subset of my worldly possessions, which I first experienced properly while travelling last year. (It seems somehow heretical to say that some of my favourite hours of "travel" were actually spent in departure lounges or Greyhound stations, having left where I had been but not yet arrived where I would be, just waiting. I also loved being on my way from one place to another and arriving somewhere new, but I'm pretty sure those are things I'm supposed to love.)
Now I have some space with myself and my "essential" stuff in it, while all the (other) non-essential stuff sits in a room in Melbourne where it can't actively oppress me (although I'll still have to deal with it sooner or later). And I'm gradually hacking together a composite of established, lapsed and new routines and attitudes which will - I hope - become the new "familiar and normal".
It's frustrating that my preferred method of getting to know a new place (i.e. walking all over it and ferretting out awesome things) is not available to me this time. I knew San Francisco better after two days than I know Brisbane after two weeks; apart from a couple of repeatedly-traversed routes it's still a complete stranger to me. Expanding my horizons (both physical and social) up here is something that needs to happen, but as I'm somewhat hamstrung by my health it might take a while. It seems that all my experiments in self-brainwashing in recent years are now paying off, though: not raging and railing against this is proving fairly easy to practise.
Many things remind me unavoidably that I am in a strange place. Listening to the local weather forecast, I find no familiarity in the place names. If I want to buy a plastic container to keep cereal in, I don't immediately think of half a dozen convenient places to look for one. I don't ever see a single person I recognise (or who recognises me) when walking about in the city. There aren't any trams. And it's warm (although the natives complain about the cold).
The strangest thing is that I keep waiting for the "things have changed and now they're different" feeling to hit. I don't think it's going to. Of course things have changed, and of course they're different, but I'm still walking around on the same feet and looking out from the same skull. There are plenty of more dramatic life-altering events that still wouldn't change that.
The secret of conclusions is that there often isn't one.
