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reddragdivaPerth is so amazingly tedious it goes out the other side of "dull" and through to some sort of Nirvana-like state of introspection, only with Nutrasweet, yellow swimsuits, five months of thirty to forty degrees, undrinkable piss lager and hideous complacency. Also if you don't have a car you're utterly, utterly fucked. It's a damn good place to go when you have to get the fuck away from it all for six months or a year. Clean, cheap, fatally pleasant, lots of nice people. So quiet and clean, it's like the Martians left several hundred years ago and left all their buildings behind. It is Vermilion Sands. But, you know, I did so much getting away from it all growing up there that I think I'll be spending the rest of my life trying to get to it all. It's somewhere to come from or go back to. I've done one and don't plan to do the other. The young people either move to Melbourne before thirty or they curdle and become lifers.
No-one ever leaves ... Perth. It's on the other side of the event horizon. You don't get out of Perth except by going "fuck it" and leaving with a ticket and a single suitcase — the traveller's equivalent of quantum tunnelling. You forget your name when you come to ... Perth. You go to Perth, you better buy your ticket out before you go, 'cos you'll wake up one day and it'll be three years later and you'll have Perth friends and a Perth girlfriend/boyfriend and wonder what happened.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 03:51 pm (UTC)"When you're 18, you get a choice. Leave Maine, or get hit in the head by a shovel."
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 04:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 04:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 04:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 04:16 pm (UTC)You've just described exactly why
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 04:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 04:27 pm (UTC)It's like quicksand - struggling just makes the death quicker and more unpleasant. You have to get out early or it's too late.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 04:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 04:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 05:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 05:24 pm (UTC)Now that thats out of the way...
Like anywhere else, your life and the people in it are what matters. Perth is a place where you can step off the treadmill if you choose, and thats a nice thing about it. But it can be tedious if you spend time with the tedious, or much better than that if you find a community worth being a part of.
I love Perth every summer. I LIKE the heat, and it has beaches like nowhere else, which can be a reason to like the heat. But best of all, in the summer, there is enough happening (with festivals, etc) that just for a few months you don't feel like you are in a cultural backwater.
I hate Perth every winter. Not cold enough to be interesting, just wet and miserable, and completely devoid of anything resembling cultural activity worth a damn. It makes me want to get out, and often enough I manage it. If it don't, well, it can be a good time to get things done.
The beer has improved since you left.
Moving to Melbourne is sometimes a valid option of course. But Perth people moving to Melbourne and living in a house full of ex-Perth people and telling themselves its all so much cooler there is a common holding pattern, a substitute for movement while people try to decide what they are doing with their lives. Eventually people either work out that its not where they live thats the problem, or decide its not Perth but Australia thats the problem, or decide that if you are going to be a whore you get a better rate in Sydney.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 06:22 pm (UTC);-p
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 06:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 07:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 07:05 pm (UTC)Stange strange person, I've been there twice during the .au summer and the 40C+ temperatures are a killer for me and just confirm that I'm perfectly adapted to the UK. Comfortable in cool / cold conditions, waterproof and with decent taste in beer ;) [Last time I was there I think the in-laws finally got the message about me and heat when hiding from the sun, drinking lots of water and taking it easy did nothing to stop me getting heat stroke]
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 07:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 07:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 07:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 08:13 pm (UTC)Perth sounds like Seattle except that our summers are also wet and miserable.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 08:18 pm (UTC)And I've had friends from Perth come back from the UK ranting about not seeing the sun for 6 months at a time.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 08:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 08:23 pm (UTC)Only because there's no way I could have survived in a Perth jail while serving the sentence.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 09:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 10:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 10:50 pm (UTC)And to think I moved *to* there.
Escaped though.