# 114

Generally speaking, I've been impressed with what I've seen around me in the City of Churches, not that I've done a great deal more than skip along the footpath following another triumphant arrival into the city where I negated the bus driver's homicidal driving technique and recently-out-of-gaol stare via the rear vision mirror in order to bring your this, I guess classic post.

Adelaide: the place that has offered the only three-digit number for probability in the nation involving the propulsion of spit from one's mouth landing on someone known to the spitter; the same city which had called me its Little Darling Bitch-Boy for twenty-one seasoned years despite my protests. If truth were a bubble created through soapy water and a single breath, the city's mother-like tendencies choked the passion from within my veins and prevented me from venturing into vastly more evolved landmasses with more cultural diversity, more tolerance for the individual psyche and lesser association with primordial mankind.

If truth continued to seep from within, then it would read thusly: this primitive souffle of a city has impressed me so much that I'm in shock at just how much it has changed in the space between when I fucked off and began a life and slightly more than seven-and-a-half years later. At first I thought I had stepped out of the plane into a parallel dimension, where an actual, ridgy-didge airport announced my arrival into the 2000s. It was a far cry from the retro '60s outfit the Adelaide airport had going there for nigh on three decades. But the glitz, the sheen and the 2025 prices of completely useless paraphernalia between the plane's door and the airport's exits were the emerging signs of joy in my pants.

To me, as I first drove along North Terrace again, being back in Adelaide wasn't the White Australia that I had envisaged John Howard to have created during my absence. Who would've thought I'd be driving in a rented shitbox only to stare out the car window to witness a multicultural bowl of porridge my lil ole City o' Churches had become? Not fucken me is who. I felt as white as a Klan member with a wintery suntan courtesy of Japan when I noticed my fellow 'delaide dwellers of Asian and African origin.

Now, I don't know how much of this positive experience can be attributed directly to moving from the eastern suburbs and into the hills, and having spent four years in Cairns, where the no-shoes policy worked to everyone's advantage except for foreigners hell-bent on observing the socks and sandals policy (fuckin' weirdos) no matter what the weather or their pea-sized brains told them, and then three years of cultural extreme in Japan, but I must admit THAT I'M UTTERLY STOKED WITH WHAT YOU GOOD PEOPLE HAVE DONE WITH THE PLACE.

I can't emphasise that last part enough.