Mozzeenet

Mum and Ian visited me here the week before last and we had a ball together. Ian was here for four days including his birthday and Mum was here for ten days.

Last Sunday Mum, Andrew and I went for a drive to visit family friends who we knew in PNG who live in Warragul, 100km east of Melbourne. On the way, we had to stop at Fountain Gate!

Yes it is a real shopping centre in suburban Melbourne! We saw a butcher, several homeware shops and an electronics store where we looked for Kel, Brett and Prue and Trude and we thought we saw Kimmy and Sharon coming down the escalator towards us shopping for some strappy mules and a hot pink bespangled boob tube.

I bought myself some new casual shoes and have the receipt to prove it (see photo). Look at me! Look at me! Look at moooiii!

I had an interesting revelationary moment when buying those shoes. The sales assistant helpfully informed me after I’d said I would take the shoes which were on sale and a good price that I could now get anything else in the store for half the price (or the shoes would be half price - whichever item was less). I looked around and saw a heap of nice-looking tops and thought it was a great deal. Mum, Andrew and I all started rifling through the racks and after a lot of umming and ahhing I had found two tops to try on. I tried them on and decided on one - because I had to buy something else to get the half price!

Then in the change room, it suddenly dawned on me. I didn’t need any more tops and they didn’t match the shoes anyway. I was buying something I didn’t really need for the sake of it because it sounded like a good deal. I walked out, put the tops back and took the shoes up to the counter. The sales assistant laughed at me because it had taken me so long to get there. But I realised that it was a sales ploy. I would have walked out of there paying what I normally would pay for a pair of casual shoes. Admittedly I would have had an extra top but the point was that I didn’t need it and I hadn’t planned to buy another a top.

We did some other great things while Mum and Ian were here - we visited the Prahran markets which has excellent fresh produce and went out for dinner a few times. For Ian’s 26th birthday, we went to a Malaysian restaurant at St Kilda. We had wanted to go to Cicciolinas down there but it is a very popular restaurant and doesn’t take bookings so by the time we got there it was going to be a one and a half hour wait. We decided to skip it and just go to another restaurant nearby which was a bit disappointing but the food at the Malaysian place turned out to be great, we had a bottle of champagne to celebrate and it was an enjoyable evening.

The last few days has been extremely hot - the Australian Open for tennis is on here at the moment and they’ve had to invoke the ‘extreme weather’ rule and close the rooves on the arenas - outdoor matches are not allowed today. Today it is expected to reach 43 degrees celcius and yesterday, it was in the late 30s. Unbelievable - there’s a hot wind and the fan just circulates hot air. It reminds me so much of Cambodia. April and May, the hottest months, when we arrived in the country were like this every day. There was no escape - it doesn’t cool down at night and you just lie there in a pool of sweat. We had foam mattresses which became really hot and I was sleeping in an annex area next to the verandah which was stifling. We never walked very far for this reason (as well as there being an absence of functional footpaths).