I want to ride my bicycle/I want to ride my bike

Some may have heard about the horrible ordeal we (Max, Ray, Bae, and I) endured in Melbourne.

This post is bloody long so only read this if you have several moments to spare.

That being said, Melbourne is a great city, and it's lively without the hordes of people+cars everywhere. Also it's ahead of Sydney in public transport and hipster architecture (ask Ray for full details).

So anyway we landed in Melbourne at about lunch time. Thinking "omg #hipstercapital" we decided to avoid eating at a chain restaurant, and instead Max, Bae and I bought a hotdog from an indie hotdog stand.

Here Max made an observant comment that "eating sweet crepes" is actually just eating dessert with a pastry base. So you can say "Oh I ate sweet crepes for lunch" instead of saying "I ate ice cream, yoghurt and cheesecake for lunch". 

Anyway Raymond the hipster-hipster ate at Red Rooster instead. Perhaps that's meta-hipster.

Okay so we then met up with Sun, who had finished his interviews, and was bumming around till he needed to arrive at airport at 6pm. Then it all went downhill from there.

1) We saw a bicycle hire, initiative of the Victorian Government, where you paid $2.60 to be able to take out bikes for 30min intervals for the day.

2) Sun can't ride a bike

3) We were carrying luggage anyway

4) We need a Mastercard, as that is the only accepted payment.

5) Each Mastercard can take out a maximum of two bikes (says the sign)

Okay so it's about 3 o'clock and we decided we really wanted to ride bikes around Melbourne. So we were like "alright Sun. brb we will dump our luggage at the hotel, come back and say bye, and then bike."

So we took a train + shuttle bus to the hotel, checked in, chilled for a few mins, left, and took the shuttle bus back towards the train station.

Surprise, motherfucker! Raymond gets a call that he needs to go back to the hotel where a family friend doctor will meet him and check out his mysterious rashy and incredibly infectious and disgusting disease. So he takes the shuttle bus back to the hotel, while Bae, Max and I carry on.

Oh for fuck's sake we forgot that only Raymond and I had Mastercards. So this meant that we could only hire two bikes. Between 3 people.

Oh also it was like 5 already and Sun had to leave to catch his flight. So we kinda just bailed on him and never came back, from his perspective (sorry Sun).

So we got there, right. Bae graciously offered to sit this one out (after much feelz). Max and I were left, and we bought a $5 helmet from 7-11 (gov't sponsored). Then I went to stick my Mastercard into the machine. Tap "Rent a Bike". 

How many bikes do you want to rent?

1, 2, 3, 4

So like, we could've rented 3??? Okay let's try this then.
Something like "Request cannot be processed". Okay, fair enough then. It did say maximum of 2 bikes per credit card.
Let's tap two bikes. "Request cannot be processed". Hmm interesting. Maybe that's not how the machine works, and I have to rent one bike at a time?
Tapped one bike. Ooh yeahh I managed to get a bike out. OKAY then let's get another one for Max.

"The maximum number of concurrent bikes allowed for this card has been exceeded".

Okay so we were pretty sour at this point, but not broken. Returned the bike, walked to another station, tried again. It just couldn't read the credit card, which was better than denying us bikes straight out, I suppose. Had a brainwave to walk a bike to the next station and try it there (I don't know, we were relying on voodoo magic and prayers to get two bikes, okay).

Of course, no luck, because fuck me (us), right?

With no morale left, we met up with Bae and went to eat at a pub (derno about terminology, but it's place that serves alcohol and lets people smoke LOL). A note that Melbourners have a pretty intense smoking culture. I had a chicken parma which was delicious. All our food was delicious and so our night was not intensely wasted. But we did waste at least 2h trying to get two bikes.

Slept at around 11pm, after watching some Family Guy that happened to be showing. A lot of the humour comes from the fact that something stupid happens for so long that it becomes uncomfortable, and then it feels right to laugh to dispel the awkwardness. Anyways we did a bit of ironing, showered, and slept.

Wake up in the morning at 7am, even though my interview is at 12:15, because I'm a bro. Had a quick shower and ate a bowl of muesli that tasted terrible (damn you Uncle Toby). Walked with the group (they all had 8:15 interviews), checked out, went to Monash.

So note that I was at Monash at 8:15am and my interview was predicted to end at 4:25pm. That is 8 hours, mon amies. I bummed around at the food court, walked around, found out where the library was, charged my iPod while playing chess with it, went to food court to bum some more, bought calamari rings that had no calamari in them, bought flake and chips that was too rubbery and I didn't have a knife, and then finally went to interviews.

So what Monash does, is make some of the people who start at 8:15 wait until 12:15 after their interviews, so they can't communicate. I never really got it because if I waterboarded someone who did it on the 6th (I was on 7th), I could achieve the same cheating results. Anyways I checked in for interviews at 12:15. Then we waited until 2:15. Our interview was delayed until like 3:30-ish (guesstimating, since interviews take 1.5h and we finished at 5pm). Yeah anyways I had been in Monash for 7h+ before commencing interviews.

In the meantime, Max, Ray and Bae managed to pick up 3 bikes using Raymond's Mastercard and were riding around merrily.

Okay so I finished (luckily the interviews weren't as unlucky as the trip on the whole. Fingers crossed that I exchanged all my luck for what really matters ahaha). I'm on public transport.

Melbourne has a City Loop as well, but it sits for about 10min at the station while transitioning from regional to City Loop. So I figured. Why not get off at the first station, then ride a bike to the next station? I get my 10 minutes of glory, and I might save some time compared to taking a train.

So I get off at Flinders St (if you play Monopoly Australia, that's either a Green or Purple property bahaha) and then find a bike hire.

Apparently they don't let you hire bikes at peak hour.

So it's already 5:30-ish, we want to be at the airport at like 6:40-ish, and now I have to walk about 1.7km to Southern Cross Station. In our group Whatsapp I had to shorten it so often that now I feel like referring to it as SoCro. Well I didn't walk, of course, because I have developed a sense of urgency in all my time in Cadets :L. Still took me about 25 minutes, with all the uphills (LIKE. ALL UPHILL) and pedestrian crossings and watching cars and people and stuff.

So after my terrible day the rest of the dudes shouted me a beer, which I opened on an edge (it was my first time trying, and I managed to get it on the second go without breaking the glass. I feel like a true man :L).

Then we got onto the SkyBus (shuttle bus to airport from CBD), and Max and I got on, but Bae lost his ticket and had to get on the next bus. Ray waited for him because his ticket hadn't been scanned yet. So we all got to the airport. Bae managed to get a 1L water bottle past security by PLACING IT ON THE GODDAMN TRAY THAT GOES THROUGH THE X-RAY. Though perhaps domestic doesn't really give that much of a shit.

So Bae had a bad time too. At the airport I shouted Corona+Limes (holy fuck I got ripped by the airport jebus) for Max and Bae, cos Ray was too young LOL. At this point Max just gets free beer without suffering bahaha.

After Vaish told us that our flight was boarding and turned out not to be lying, we hurried over, but not before Raymond played that goddamn flying game where you use your arms to steer the airplane. He didn't even have anything to drink.

So we boarded on time, of course, and dicked around a lot on the plane. To my knowledge, about 8 other Rusians were on that flight, but we only saw like 2 others. Slightly inebriated, we just chilled for most of the flight.

Max got his suffering when the plane was landing. The pressure in the cabin was messed up (if you were on JQ 596, please confirm this) so my ears were feeling weird too. But according to Max he felt "marbles in his veins" and feared for his life. Being a good friend I gave him gum and then just kept laughing at him :D.

So there ends the story of what I/we suffered in Melbourne. I hope you can find some sort of enjoyment out of our misery :L