Sven's life in Oz

Now I’ve got all that craziness out of my system I can get on to telling you all about my weekend, which was heaploads of fun without the usual dancing and drinking and hangovers. Do you get that too, where one thing just has to come out before you can move on to the next? It happens to me all the time.

This weekend, thanks to the marvel of Twitter, I made a new friend. Matt and I have been tweet friends for a while and when he emailed to say he would be in Sydney “to see Cate in A Streetcar Named Desire”(Cate Blanchett, of course – she’s on first name terms with the nation, it seems) it was the perfect opportunity to get together, so that’s what we did.

Matt and I met at the Museum of Contemporary Art and tried to look around at the exhibits, but we ended up talking far too much to take it in so  we called it a day on the culture front and got coffees instead. A few hours later and we were discussing what makes a classic film classic (Mary Poppins is a classic, Casablanca is not) and making fun of people’s jogging outfits like we’d known each other for years.

I love meeting people you just click with. There’s something great about making a joke where the other person laughs like a friend who has spent a decade getting to appreciate your caustic brand of humour. After spending a year being “always on” when meeting new people, it’s such a gift to have an effortless conversation with someone new. Sadly he lives in Melbourne, but on the plus side, I’ve got a friend down south and an excuse to visit. Hurrah!

In other news, I saw Moon this weekend and enjoyed it. I think I read too much about it first so it wasn’t as thrilling as it could have been, but I appreciated the quality and would certainly watch it again. I also saw Valkyrie on DVD and liked that too, for opposite reasons: I had heard bad things about it and was pleased to see it wasn’t as awful as all that. Finally, I went to Sydney’s Deaf Fair and made some new Deaf friends who promised to look after me at the next Deaf social night. Just as well – I discovered that British Sign Language and Auslan are indeed 65% the same: the 35% difference is virtually all the nouns. I’m going to need all the help I can get.