Melbourne, Australia

…is a place filled with heat and tourists. Through the shimmering waves of hot air, a dozen languages can be heard filling the busy streets of the central business district (CBD) or simply ‘the city’ as the locals call this part of the downtown.
This city is perfect in many of the ways I love. There are quite a number of nice parks and gardens.  Public transit is more extensive than anywhere I have ever been –there are trams on every major street of the CBD, and well beyond. It has several superb libraries. The roads are packed with fancy and not-so-fancy bikes alike, crowding the numerous bike lanes. On Strava, even the small segments have had tens of thousands of riders on them.
And above all, the city is beautiful. The surprisingly clean streets are crowded with a jostle of the old and new. In the Docklands, impressive modern buildings rise with curving lines in the sky. In the CBD, Victorian stone buildings are punctured with the rising fists of skyscrapers. Descending from the city, and spreading out across the bay are miles and miles of golden beaches, shining under the nearly endless sun.
In the past, I have always felt there were two, distinct kinds of cities: cities like Minneapolis which were clean, beautiful places to live, but lacking the imposing decorum of history, and cities like many of those of Europe, crowded with antiquities but often dirty and lacking modern pleasantries –like enough trees. Melbourne bridges the gap. It is old, beautiful, cultured, and yet young enough to not have been frozen awkwardly in the past. It’s the beaches of LA, the infrastructure of Denmark, the glamor and shopping of London, all rolled into one.
There’s a Target store here, dropped right in the middle of Chinatown, its entry overlooked by one of the ornate Chinese archways. Surprisingly, it seems to compliment, not clash with, the feel of the community.
I just hate the crowds! In particular, tourists from Asia, but also from America, Germany, and the rest of the British Commonwealth. I can’t go out the door of the hostel without being swept up in a sea of humanity. Perhaps partly this might be due to a lack of major boulevards for pedestrian use. The streets of the CBD are wide, but not really designed for mobs of tourists. Combined with the heat, the mass feels oppressive, pushing me restlessly away.
               I think one of the things I love about Minneapolis is that it is a city built around a people. The people build the city, and the city shapes them in turn. Here, I worry that the heart of the city is being lost, consumerized for the tourists and the cash they flood the streets with. It is hard as an outsider to speak with any certainty on this subject. Maybe the people do still feel they own the place, or all of the place except the CBD, at least. Immigrants, I think, generally benefit a community, but tourists, they benefit the economy, but, perhaps, destroy the soul of a place.
I haven’t actually done too much here, mostly work and some cycling. And perhaps that is why I am thinking about this city the way I am. Since I am working and living as if, at least briefly, I did live here, I see not a tourist’s paradise, but a living city struggling with tourists’ demands –just like me, living, and struggling with the demands of being a tourist, that need to maximize the experience, without getting scammed or wasting large amounts of cash…