Tuesday, July 08, 2003
Where: Uncle Manjit's house, Brisbane
When: 12:53pm, local time
Settled in Brisbane now, with most of the various funeral-related prayers and events all done and dusted. The funeral itself started off in a rather surreal fashion, because I walked in halfway through to be mobbed by my rather cheerful family -- cheerful to see me after six long months, but still, we were in a funeral wake so I wasn't entirely sure how appropriate that was. It was a combination of that, my lack of sleep, and the fact that I haven't actually seen my grandfather for almost a year that accoutned for none of it hitting me. It just didn't register that the body in the coffin that looked kinda like my grandfather actually WAS my grandfather. And it didn't hit me until they played a tape he made for his wife of him singing Unchained Melody against what sounds like a karaoke machine. The song is incredibly cliched, the singing was in all truth not the best, and the backing music was cheesy in the extreme, but none of that mattered because it hit me so hard right then and there that that voice was now gone for good.
I don't want to dwell on all that for too long, but it was definitely worth a note.
We spent the rest of the day reminiscing at my aunt's spectacular house out in the Brisbane suburbs. Actually, I don't think they were even suburbs. See, Brisbane itself is rather large, but given that only about a million people live there, everything is spread out and uncluttered... so while her area would probably be known as the countryside in Hong Kong, it's vaguely suburban here in Brisbane. And while I despise the sparse country life, her house is quite simply amazing. Just... amazing. If I had my camera, I'd post pictures galore, because it was an astonishingly beautiful house.
The last time I was in Australia, I was five years old. My main memory of Australia then was that it was very, very quiet. And generally that's proved to be true. Thanks to Brisbane not being densely populated (unlike London or Hong Kong), everything here just seems... quiet. Hell, when I arrived at the airport and stepped out into the carpark I was greeted with silence. No wailing of kids and adults struggling with luggage, no cars beeping, no planes flying overhead, nothing. I'm familiar with noise, and indeed arriving in Hong Kong on Thursday I had all of that waiting for me at the airport, but not here.
Last time I came we also flew out to the Gold Coast, an hour south of Brisbane, and I went there again yesterday with my entire (extended) family. That's all 13 grandchildren, with myself being by far the oldest. These kids have it lucky in that Gold Coast now is far better than the one I had (Movie World, Dream World and Sea World weren't here then, for a start), but it's still not exactly my thing. It's winter here now, remember, so the beach is out of the question (despite my little brother's protestations, the Wet n' Wild waterpark is also out of the question), but I get a very odd vibe from the place. Despite this being Australia, Westernised in culture if not in geography, Gold Coast felt an awful lot like a far less seedy version of Phuket or Bali. Then again, maybe that's because most of the tourists out in Phuket and Bali actually ARE Australian, but...
Posted at 1:18 PM
