Leaving this town

It sounds pretty trite and silly to say that everyone eventually has to do something they don't want to do, but heck, it's my blog. So deal with it.

Yesterday, I left Perth indefinitely.

Perth is a golden city in a lot of ways; I heard an English transit officer on the 2:15am McIver stop say it was "paradise on earth." Of course, he was saying it to an incredibly drunk, trashy-looking lady insisting that Australia was a terrible place because of what they did to the Aboriginals, so probably the next thing that happened was a fight. But Perth has amazing people and gorgeous beaches and delicious food that you sometimes don't even have to sell your body parts to eat. Perth is pretty great.

And so are the people. I think my time in Perth became a love song to the people I met -- not all of them, just the ones I like -- and it would be impossible to extricate my time in Australia from the people I loved. I met Jason at the end of February 2010, and left him yesterday. I met Sian my first day in Perth and can't imagine not seeing her again.  As Nancy said to me today, "You know I'm obviously going to see you again, right?" I don't think I could have stood leaving if I thought I'd really never see anybody again. But if I think about it too much it makes me too sad to function, so I shouldn't think about it too much.

On the bright side, at least I took my mind off everything by going to a museum about American war atrocities in the Vietnam War, that contained the words "imperialist Americans" and "totalitarian regime" (about the Americans). I think the theory was, I could distract myself from my emotional distress by looking at pictures of people being shot. So that's good. At least I haven't been doused in napalm.

Also, I saw a magazine in the Kuala Lumpur airport called Cosmetic Surgery Magazine with the tagline "Because nobody's perfect". That sort of cheered me up a little bit, too, mostly because I thought it was a joke.

Since I'm back on the road, for an indefinite time and going to unclear places, I figured it was high time I started updating this blog more regularly too, so you can hear about all the times I get afraid I've gotten Hepatitis. In case you were wondering, so far on this trip, it's been about five times and I only got here yesterday afternoon. Since then I've eaten unidentified rice paper rolls from a street vendor, had numerous drinks with ice in them, and eaten fresh basil. I figure I might as well embrace intestinal discomfort with fortitude; that way when it finally strikes, I'll get it all over at once.