OK OK, I know I missed March and it's been six weeks, but I guess it's been a busy six weeks.

Today I went to an exhibition at the NGV entitled Manstyle. Basically it's an exhibition of random clothing items designed or worn by blokes. It's more or less contemporary outfits with some stuff from over the past couple of decades. Like a number of the small temporary exhibitions at the NGV I've seen over the past couple of months, it's a pretty random collection of items. Anyway, there were two stand out items there

a) This weird frayed denim jacket thing by Vivenne Westwood with a big red thing around the penile area


and then there was this item which I feel steals the show...

b) This unwashed rainsoaked green Animal brand green jacket on which most of the waterproofing has been artistically removed by regular exposure to Dublin precipitation


PS. I like the way the NGV stands for the National Gallery of Victoria. I hate to break it to the good people of Melbourne, but Victoria is not a nation, despite what many of it's inhabitants might think.

I just noticed that it's been almost three weeks since my last entry into this thing so I suppose I better update those of you eager follower(s) (thanks Andy) as to the exciting happenings and goings on (or is it going ons? thanks Mr. Pinker, please let me know if you are reading this) in my new Victorian life.

The major issue at the moment is that I am still looking for work. This has a lot to do with why I haven't updated the blog as I'd imagined that the next entry would include good news in that respect. Unfortunately not. In fact, the job seen has been remarkably slow, with only two interviews in seven weeks. I did have an interview on Friday for a job that sounds quite interesting, mainly due to the fact that the project is based in the SE Asian city in which I once lived for almost a year (I think the project's a secret or summink so that's about as much as I can divulge). I also like the idea of working on a project that is based outside of Australia as it might give me more of a chance to ease into working as an architect here, particularly considering I am not fully up to speed on stuff like Planning law in Victoria/Melbourne. Although I guess having worked on projects in a number of countries by this stage, things like that shouldn't really worry me I spoze. Anyway, I find out about that job on Wednesday - when they will or won't call me for a second interview.

So in the mean time, I'll keep bugging recruitment agents, calling up architectural offices and sending out emails.

I have been spending a fair bit of time in the Victorian State Library in the city, which has a large reading/study area and free wifi internet access. Plus the cafe next door is not bad. Most days the library reading area is filled with international backpackers, a lot of whom seem to be applying for fruit picking or temp jobs, often talking very loudly on their mobile phones whilst sitting under the big sign with a crossed-out silhouette of a mobile phone on it. Noticeably significant numbers of French speaking people frequent this place and on a number of occasions, I've had a group of French people sitting next to me trying to work out the proper English for job application cover letters with varied success. Then half an hour later, they are replaced by a group of Victorian high school students trying to work out sentence structures for their French homework. I don't know if it's to do with the fact I've been reading Richard Branson's autobiography, but I can't help but thinking there's a business opportunity there somewhere. Surely high school students should be able to adequately proof read cover letters for job applications to work at Starbucks and most French backpackers should have a decent grasp of Grade 10 level French grammar? It reminds me of a presentation I once saw on new ideas in Education whereby French kids were learning English by talking to English speaking kids on Skype and vice versa.

Hanging out in the library was meant to help me focus on applying for work but it does have a tendency to distract as it's a great people watching place. For example, last week a group of four gansta chinese kids with piercings, tattoos, baseball caps, and lots of rap lingo who looked like they'd turned up to cause some kind of mini-triad-like trouble but as it turned out had arrived for their maths tutoring and were soon discussing trigonometry problems within some kind of discussion group lead by their tutor.

Also that day, I sat near another kid who was get getting tutored by someone who didn't seem much older than her. Both were apparently of Korean decent as they were talking about other Koreans they knew and bitching about them in a Californian 'valley girl' kind of parlance with lots of 'lol'ing and giggling. In between that conversation however, they were discussing the difference between gas and column type chromotography. Madness.

To get away from listening in on other people's conversations, I've been spending time out the back in the newspaper reading room. However I am finding that equally distracting as people turn up there to read newspapers from all over the planet including a guy who got upset as the library had three Vietnamese dailies but not the one he was looking for. Meanwhile, I sit in the corner reading the latest headline grabbing news in The Mercury or the delayed copies of the Guardian - I like to get my news from varied sources.

Another highlight of the past couple of weeks was my crucial role in the assembly of a shed at the backyard of my cousin Luke and his partner Caroline. Importantly, I purchased a $4 blue singlet from KMart and whilst I was missing the faded Blundstone boots and Stubby shorts, I felt that the navy blue vest (or 'wifebeater' as it is colloquially known) did help me with a task as Australian as erecting a shed. Luckily Luke had a white version of a similar garment and it has to be said that the quality of workmanship and efficiency of construction programme was significantly improved by our attire...

While I'm on the topic of happy snaps from the past week or so, here's a photo of an Australian-Irish citizen standing outside the Australian Irish Welfare Bureau in Northcote, taken during a bike ride that Alex and myself did on Saturday....



... I was surprised not to find a queue of Irish people out the door considering now must be a busy time for this organisation!

There is an ad that appears on trams all around Melbourne at the moment that says, "Attend a leading University without having to set foot in one".

Wowzers, I must have been ahead of my time when I went to uni if that's what they're doing these days!

Note to self - if it feels bluddy hot first thing in the morning in Melbourne, it's probably not going to cool down for a while and you should probably not cycle 10km into town without sunscreen on. Whilst a nice breeze and some cloud has somehow cooled the place down a bit, this morning was a stinkin warm one. Luckily my cousin Sarah's place (where I'm staying) stays relatively temperate but when you walk outside it's like someone is blowing a air dryer on you.

Anyway, enough about the weather, I better get used to it. One bonus is that during my cycle I called into a McDonald's attached to the children's hospital (how very evil that is) for some airconditioned bliss and a wee wee. Upon this visit, i\I was pleasantly surprised to find that Gerrit Rietveld and/or Piet Mondrian must have been commissioned to provide new designs for McDonalds waste bin receptacles. They've come up really nice...


I'm sure all those sick kids hanging around McDonald's digesting that well know elixir aka the Happy Meal appreciate that nice touch and reference to design classics. I think the column adjacent to the bin was by Mario Botta.

I continued my ride into town and ended up in the Docklands area that I'm pretty sure my old company did a scheme for - which looks very similar and feels as sparse as dockland regen projects the world over. Lots of fairly soulless architecture with plenty of curtain walling. Although it seems there's been a decent uptake of the commercial buildings there so there were more than your normal global docklands redevelopment punters walking around at lunch time. No doubt still fewer than would have been drawn in the architectural presentations and 'artist's impressions'. There was also a pretty weird Cost Co building down there that disturbed me. I think I will have more wonky Melbourne building nightmares after my ones the other night brought on by my tour of wonky Melbourne buidlings in the city. I think my new tag line for employers will be : I don't do wonky. Classic examples of what I am talking about can be found here and here. Madness. And pointless. I also always think of my friend BT's term for the DCM buildings every time I see one such as this and this and this as sieg heils due to their abrupt angular elements.

Needless to say, I caught the train back home. Although it's cooled down. Despite everyone saying that there is never any reprieve from hot weather, the breeze seems to have brought a cool change and indeed a reprieve from hot weather.

Also, today has so far marked a triumph for me in that I have not yet eaten a packet of Twisties. There are still 6.5 hours left in the day and the 24 hr. 7eleven is not far away, but I'm sure I can to it. One step at a time. Once I conquer twisties, I can hopefully concentrate on not buying Clinkers and BBQ Shapes. It's fair to say that I have been indulging on foods from my childhood since I got back which is not doing me any good at all.

Hope you all liked my hyperlinking madness. I make an effort for you people you see.

Photographic evidence of that Bogan Burger....




(photo credits: R. Bowker)!!

So I was thinking today about how people abbreviate words when texting r typing to make it quicker to write whatever they are trying to communicate. However when you are hand writing, the actual physical size of the individual letters comes into play. So I've decided to categorise letters by their size / length to help me spend less time handwriting stuff whenever I have to. From now on, it will be all 'i's and 'c's and fewer 'w's. Discuss.

Lower Case (smallest to biggest):

i l c o s e z a j r x t f v u n y h k b d p q g m w

Upper Case (smallest to biggest):

I C L J V U O D T Y X F P G S Z Q E R N K A H B M W

So having arrived in Melbourne and things have settled a bit in terms of settling in to house and getting around the city (although no job yet) I have decided to start blogging about what I'm up to. Mainly it's so that my friends in Ireland and elsewhere can check out what I'm up to - I feel guilty not respond to lovely mails from my friends back in RoI and whilst this is not a substitute for a response, it's perhaps a way of filling in the space between receiving and responding to mail! Maybe.

Plus I have also found a great park to hang out with very close to my cousin's house, where I am staying until July and it's great sitting here overlooking the mini lake and public swimming pool and enjoying Melbourne's sunny weather.

Melbourne is going really well for me at the moment and whilst the job scene has been pretty quiet (I'm told it's always that way in January so hopefully it will pick up next week) I haven't actually found anything about Melbourne that isn't great. I was talking to a girl from Brisbane at a bbq on Australia who when asked what the down sides were about Melbourne, all she could think of was that the weather isn't great. Luckily for me, having lived for a decade inn Dublin, I have become pretty used to not getting hung up on weather and after all, Melbourne's winters seem like nothing compared to sliding around on ice and drizzly weather on the way to work in Dublin. If that's the only negative about this place, I think I'm in for a great time! As was pointed out to me yesterday, the great thing about winter in this part of the world is that you can go skiing at decent ski fields that are just over 2 hr drive away. I'm really looking forward to that opportunity as I've never skied before - apart from the dry slop in Kilternan – will never forget the night my friend and complete novice Kenny decided to go to the top of the slope and hurtle his way down – whilst watching that I remember thinking (as gravity pulled him closer and closer to the crash barrier at the bottom of the slope) that I had never seen the results of a horrific accident before but in a few seconds that would all change. But instead he somehow managed to decelerate and ended up slowing down enough to hit the crash barrier without injury. I gained even more respect for that guy that night!

But forget about winter – the summer here is fantastic. It really does lift your spirits every day when you know it's going to be another sunny day. I have been cycling down to this park every day and sitting by the lake in the sun with my laptop and mobile broadband dongle, applying for work, looking up architectural practices on the internet and occaisionally stopping to watch the old ones slowly pacingup and down the 50m length the public open air swimming pool behind me. If I get sick of that, I head over to Puckle Street in Moonee Ponds (the home suburb of Dame Edna and slightly different to the suburbia that I'd imagined it to be) for coffee, snacks or 7eleven slurpies – extremely sweet cola or rasberry flavoured frozen ice drinks that have a tendency to give you major icecream headache and which I am become severly addicted to. My name is Matthew and I am a Slurpie addict.

If I get bored of that, I cycle somewhere else and continue my laptopping or else I turn it into a longer exploratory adventure to help build my mind's map of my new hometown. Yesterday I headed out at around 9am and by time I'd eventually ended up in town (about 8 km from where I'm living) cycling up and down Melbourne's gridiron street layout to look at new buildings that have popped up or are popping up, checked out the new Rectangular football stadium, tennis centre and MCG and then up to Fitzroy to check out Alex and Renee's new pad, it was 6pm already. I did however make up for any energy lost during the cycle by having a Bogan Burger (huge burger comprising a minute steak, chicken schnizte, rasher of bacon, an egg and a potato cake – culinary genius and about 2500cal I'd day) at the Napier - a fantastic pub literally within a decent stone throw's distance from Alex and Ren's balcony.

Despite making the most of my time of leisure, I am keen to get stuck into a decent job hopefully somewhere doing nice projects and with good bosses. I have spent a lot of hours checking out architecs in Melbourne and whilst there is a trend here for what I would consider overly fashionable architecture, I am sure there are some offices out there doing meaningful, sound architecture. I think I might have found one or two on the net over the past week so next week will be starting cold calling – beware receptionists in architectural practices in greater Melbourne.

I had been relying almost solely on architectural recruitment agents until now but considering I'm registered with five agents so far and only had two interviews, things are nowhere near as easy as I'd first thought they might be. Sadly the job that I had an interview via Skype with was filled internally by someone from their Sydney office – I was pretty annoyed by that as it seemed to fullfil a lot of the criteria that I am looking for in an ideal job, including office size, role and the fact that it was a design-end project rather than construction end (which I am keen to have a break from followign considerable contract administration on site during my time in Dublin). Following that interview, the director had contacted my referees and seemed very keen to talk to me when I arrived in Melbourne but sadly the recruitment agent was on holidays for several weeks after christmas and I stupidly was loyal to him and decided not to contact the practice directly – as it turns out that will be the first and last time I put the interests of employment agents.

I might end up having to brush off that experience of five years at McDonald's soon enough. By the sound of it, it may be a slow start to the construction industy's year, with a lot of places having projects put on hold and talk that a lot of public funding to things like the big Regional Rail Network scheme being put on hold in order to divert funds to flood relief. I hadn't really wanted to get back into railway projects but considering it looks like all the funding on school projects has all but finished (seems like every school in Aus has had millions spent on it over the past two years) I might be having to turn my attention to rail and also my residential experience. If I have to get into residential schemes, I'd love to get into alternative public housing projects like the first project I ever worked on with James Morrison in Hobart – a low cost cohousing project for a really decent group of families with fantastic new ideas about how communities should live together.

Anyway, we'll see what happens. Australia is a lot more expensive than I'd remembered and almost twelve months with no proper income has taken significant toll on the old bank balance. I'm lucky to have a great tenant for my house in Dublin and I've got a E20k credit limit on my John Rocha designed credit card (how Celtic Tiger cub-esque is that!) so I will hopefully stretch it out in the world of unemployment for a while.

I think it's time for another Slurpie. This has been a pretty mundane start to the blog. There is plenty more to report in due course and I'm sure there'll be plenty more to report.

I hope all is well with everyone back in Ireland despite the crazy government shenanigans etc.

More soon......

Matt