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| Melbourne |
Melbourne - the home of Vegemite, finally explaining the reference in the 80’s Men at Work song – “He just smiled and hand me a vegemite sandwhich, and say: ‘I come from a land down unda’”. The city is hip, clean and beautiful. Gorgeous architecture, hot woman, and a great bar/café scene make this city a cool combination of Boston, San Fran, and Denver. Going along the Yaroo river, you think you literally see downton Boston juxtaposed to the Embarcadero (San Francisco), next to Southern boardwalk of New York City’s financial district. The streets in downtown mirror those in San Fran. And everything is clean with public transportation aplenty.
Melbourne is the San Francisco to Sidney’s LA (from what we hear). The rivalry between the two sister cities is pretty brutal. A typical conversation I have had over the last three days with people from Melbourne goes like this: “Gday. Hi, we’re here from the states (obvious). What should we see in Melbourne? We are going to Sidney next?” “Sidney, its so dirty there” or “Sidney, well, if you have to. Its OK for a weekend, I guess, but I couldn’t live there.” “Sidney, people there are so stuck up, you should just stay in Melbourne where everybody is nice” Clearly, we expect to run into an LA/Miami mentality in Sidney.
In Melbourne, everybody is so NICE! We took a Super Shuttle (called SkyBus here) and were transferring busses, an unusually easy and clear process compared with all other cities I have been too. However, seeing us on the side, a bus driver came over to us and said explained we didn’t want his bus (we already knew that) and that another would be along soon. He could take us, but it would be out of the way. This is a far cry from any public transportation professionals in the US (or anywhere else in the civilized world). No Worries!
Melbourne Day 1: Sightseeing
Glenn and I walked around the city, meeting tons of people. Our TravelLodge hotel is right in the center of things (also next to the tallest residential building in the southern hemisphere). It’s a very international city. We are told that a few years ago, Melbourne lost out only to Vancouver for most livable city in the world. Hmmmm, why didn’t Miami win? Maybe the judges didn’t speak Spanish.
The Botanical Gardens are large and sprawling and I walked through them, weaving in and out of the city streets. At night we, we check out Three Monkeys, a international bar with lot’s of locals to boot, and hear a cover band called the WildCatz. They are good, but the grundgy, backpacker scene is mostly guys flailing around.
Melbourne Day 2: Walkabout at Serendip National Park
It would be embarrassing to have gone to this fine big Island without seeing its most famous claim to fame, the Kangaroo. Mr. Kangaroo is plenty cute. And they hop. They hop in mobs, since they have individual personalities and just don’t follow the crowd at chow time like Asian tourists. They are scared of humans, but humans are scared of the huge ants which crawl around. These things have ant hills the size of Palm Island Mansions. Ants are scared of Echidnas, which eat them. We never saw an Echidna (rare to see them), because they are scared of Humans, but glad they were out there doing their duty.
The trees are alive with Koala’s. A day on a walkabout and even a Clevelander can spot a Koala nesting comfortably from 100 meters off. They mostly sit there, very cute, very distant, but we did see one climb to get some food. Just like a very slow monkey.
Our guide Belinda was awesome, and even put a little elbow grease into it when she swung her “Bush Billy Tea” kettle around to show how “Ya make Bush Billy Tea in the Ot-Bayk”. Good tea. But you need good health insurance to make it. At night we went to Chapel street.
Melbourne – Day 3
Free day, and we walk throughout the city, seeing the botanical gardens, war museum, and other things. We meet up with Katy, a friendly Boston College student studying at Melbourne University. She showed us around the town. We walked through the Botanical Gardens, past thr observatory, into the ANZAC memorial. When we ask her what we should that evening, she said she was going to a bar with people her age, but suggested we go to the Casino or something that like, it might be “more our speed”.
Instead, we go to Docklands, the mixed-use dock restoration project with condo’s a-plenty. It’s a great looking project, but as we walk through it, I notice that all the buildings are new and see an instant parallel with the residential market. My initial guess, which was close to correct, was that about half of the units still hadn’t sold and the ones that were bought were mostly not inhabited. Though they got the retail right, this project would take another 10 years to correct itself. The condos were being sold for about $700,000 Australian dollars for a two bedroom, not very far away from Miami prices, and obvious hint that their escalation in prices mirrored ours. A conversation with a residential developer on the way to Cairns in the following days confirmed my initial suspicion – the fallout in housing sales had hit the docklands very hard. Units that had sold for high prices could not be resold without substantial loss and many that were bought in pre-construction never closed. Ahhh, its good to know residential real estate bubbles are international
At Docklands, we met Paula, a Colombian girl learning English in Australia (something it seems a lot of Latin American’s do because we met a lot of them throughout Australia and New Zealand) She worked at an Italian place and didn’t like the owner. We at instead at Meccah Bah, a mediteranian place with “interesting” bloody mary’s” and pretty good food. We sat next to some drunk middle-aged people.
Title: Your Atlas
The first night in Melbourne, we met up with Ilanit, a person Glenn has been corresponding with for a while. She is a macrobiotic proponent (and contributor to Macrobiotic World magazine). An amazing woman, who also suffers from Type 1 Diabetes – that’s the bad kind. She has spent her life exploring potential answers, from both the conventional and new age side. Her latest and seemingly most promising, concerns a new spinal treatment. Supposedly, by changing the alignment of one’s “Atlas” or C1 vertebrea, you can increase significantly the information flow from the brain to all areas of the body. This realignment is done by relaxing the muscles in your neck until the Atlas falls into its proper orientation. In almost everybody, this vertebra is supposedly 23 degrees out of place, exactly mirroring the degrees that the earth is off-kilter from straight north-south orientation. Perhaps we evolved with it correctly aligned, but the world moved over eons and now our bodies can’t grow correctly aligned any more. Whatever it is, its mal-alignment pinches nerves and leads to disease.
As Ilanit’s father explained it, the body and mind communicate to properly heal things. Though antibodies and your immune system actually do the work, it’s the brain the runs the show. However, if the brain does not know that an area is cut, hurting or sick, healing is slower or non-existent. Acupuncture works because it signals to your mind that an area your mind thought was OK is really not, therefore catalyzing healing.
In Ilanit’s case, this means that pinching of nerves stopped the mind from understanding that her pancreas was sick, and not producing Insulin. She recounts that others with her condition have been healed by aligning the atlas and letting the mind do its job unhindered. She has gotten the 4-minute, painless, non-surgical procedure.
My questions to her came from both a place of skepticism but also of hope and caring. Ilanit is an attractive, bright, hope-filled individual who has had to endure more in her lifetime of 30 years than most people have to deal with in 80. One can only wish her the best.
There are a number of ways of altering the position of the atlas. Chiropracters have been forcing small changes in the atlas for years, thinking as well that it would improve the lives of their patients, but through their techniques have only been able to demonstrate partial and temporary realignments. The technique used by Ilanit and her father to alter their atlas was purely muscular. A machine that pulses ultrasound waves is applied to the back of the neck for 4 minutes, relaxing the muscles until the atlas falls into place. No direct documentation (MRI, catscan, etc.) has been used to show that the atlas has been moved, but secondary markers (an immediate improvement of inequality of leg length, etc.) have been used that are supposedly correlated with a correctly aligned Atlas.
Anecdotal evidence shows immediate improvement in health situations. However, no double-blind studies have been done that show a link between this technique and the actual change in atlas realignment and linking such realignment to health improvements and the curing of disease. Glenn is deciding whether to get the treatment done. It’s very intriguing. You never know.
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