Big city blight

We went to Melbourne yesterday, to see the Vincent Van Gogh exhibition going on there.

Didn’t see it!

We travelled by car from Yarram to Traralgon, a trip of about three quarters of an hour, where we got on the train to Melbourne for another two hours ride, followed by the ten minute walk from Flinders Street Station to the National Gallery Victoria. We had purchased tickets for the exhibition about a month ago in order, as we naively thought, to avoid the considerable queues we thought the show would attract as people bought tickets on the day.

It was a plan which seemed very good on paper, but unfortunately the exhibition was in a large, concrete hall, not on paper. The queue to get in, comprising of pre-paid and just-bought ticket-holders (there was no separation), must, in all seriousness have been about 2000 people long, with an advised waiting time of approximately an hour before you even got in there. I have never seen the gallery so full of people; even their ‘Impressionists’ exhibition of a couple of years ago didn’t attract such a crowd.

So Jacqui and I changed our minds, ascertained with a staff-member that our tickets would still be valid, right up to the day the show closes in July, and we walked back out, into another massive crowd of people just coming back into the city centre having completed some charity walk against breast cancer! We fought our way through this lot (good humouredly!), until we found a bar and popped in for a wine ($11 a glass – we can buy a whole bottle for that in Yarram!), before deciding when to attend to our other reason for being in Melbourne: the wad of Dymocks cards we had accumulated over the past year, due to all the blogs and reviews we had written for Starts at Sixty during that time! As I have already mentioned above, the round trip to Melbourne and back consumes a good six hours of our day, so we tend not to go there any more often than we have to, hence the build-up of the Dymocks cards.

But the thing that most struck me during the day was the amazing differences between a small town like Yarram and a big city like Melbourne.

Most immediately noticeable was the sheer number of people in the centre on Melbourne, increased a little no doubt by the two events going on there (the exhibition and the cancer thing). That queue alone, waiting to get in to see Van Gogh, contained more people than the whole of the population of Yarram! It was almost frightening to us, with our infrequent trips to the city after the comparative peace and quiet of our daily lives. It was something which surprised me, having once been a part of the crush ourselves, rather than small-town visitors.

And accompanying the crowds there was the noise! The noise of thousands of people talking, singing, and shouting; the noise of the many vehicles passing us, and the noise of the buskers – there seemed to be one about every fifty metres. At home we get perhaps half-a-dozen trucks a day passing our house and perhaps a hundred cars – and don’t forget, we live on the main street of the town; the noisiest road there is. I don’t recall ever seeing or hearing a busker in the town, except during our Tarra Festival every Easter, when buskers are just part of the hired help! If a kid drives through the place a little too fast and very noisy, in a slightly souped-up car with hi-fi blaring, he’s as likely as not to find that several people have phoned the police about him, but he wouldn’t even be noticed in Melbourne.

Yes, it’s a very different life between the city and the town but, although a day is enough for us and we wouldn’t want to live there again, it is rather exciting and re-energising to go there every once in a while, even if you do waste six hours going to an exhibition you don’t get to actually see!

Are you a fan of big city life?