richmond's pretty cool, i do love fitzroy, all around brunswick street, and have some friends who live in an amazing place in st. kilda.

i'm thinking though of trying to get into monash to do my phd (i'm doing it here in sadelaide, but since i'm on a govt scholarship, it should be relatively ok [not easy] to get in, and also, the school of philosophy and bioethics looks freakin awesome! yay philosophy being taken seriously in australia!). anyhoo, the point of that rave, was that i may look into trying to find somewhere around monash ... i know it's pretty far away from the city, but i have a dog, and finding a rental that allows pets is pretty hard anywhere, esp in the heart of a city (well, it seems that way in ad, unless you're a bazillionaire). Cheaper, maybe bigger, and I can always pop on the train to see all my lovely melbourne kids!

am sooooooooo excited!

when i came back from being in boston for many yrs, i did consider melbs, but finances and other stuff kinda forced me back here. now, i don't care if i'm living on ramen and lentils forever ...!

;)

what part of the uk are you you from? i lived and worked there for a while, yup, that whoe working visa thing! i did spend about half my time on the continent though ... sigh ...

[stares off wistfully into distance ...]

dude, i fucking GREW UP HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

fucking kudos to me for not ending UP in a barrel (did you see how much swearing my roots [ha ha - i said 'roots'] engender in me?!?!)

Yah, lived here for 22yrs, overseas for 8.

guess why?

the central markets are nice though, and the coastline is lovely.

and the food and wine are great, and if you know where to go, it can be a pretty cool place ... but for me, it's not so much the city, but the ghosts of my past that surround me here. ok yes, there will be at least a couple of ex-es i run a very high risk of seeing in melbs [esp since we listen to the same music, and one of them is in a melb band that's doing really well there ... no names no names!].

but yeah, adelaide is stifling at times, and seriously, since i brought my dog over from boston, and won't put him through that again, i'm stuck in oz for a good 6-10 yrs [fingers crossed! wood touched etc], so i'd rather live in melbs where i have a really good support network of friends. also, since i can't put a hemisphere, equator and international dateline between my family and myself, a border has to be sufficient!

i'm not *even* joking!