DAY TWENTY EIGHT: Looking up/back

My new year's resolution this year was to learn how to use chop sticks adeptly, but slurping down my tofu pho this evening I continue to find myself wanting on this front. At least there are four months left of 2023 to hone this skill (and I only had my book to judge me at the table tonight).

After dinner the jetlag app suggested caffeine, a perfect excuse for a 9pm tiramisu gelato. I was amazed to join a 20 minute queue, but I think this winter late night ice-cream trend might be my favourite thing about Melbourne's incredible food scene. 

I almost didn't make it on this trip. A series of losses made me think twice about being so far from home for four weeks. But as my partner always says, most decisions end up feeling like the right one after they're made, and so it was, of course, the right thing to come. 

It's been such an enriching month. I hope
that the research will benefit from all of the ideas I have encountered, and I am so grateful to have been able to have this adventure and some space for processing the last few months. 

For my last day I decided to walk down the Yarra River and revisit the 'connections' immersive digital exhibition of First Nations painting and music. The space was filled with families today and the enormous heart-wrenching projections about climate and looking after the earth, had a much more joyful quality of celebrating nature in a hall filled with children doing cartwheels and jumping between the moving images on the floor. 

Spending this month seeking out nature, art, music, food, ideas, new friends and colleagues, can't help but make me feel hopeful that mostly people are trying their best. In an everyday sense this feels true, despite the headline backdrop of climate catastrophe, world cup sexism & sexual violence, an indicted ex-US president and the collective pain of an NHS reeling from the Letby trial. 

So what next? Well, I'll take this against-the-odds and tentative optimism back to Birmingham and keep trying my best to: embrace complex answers, de-centre myself, have a go, think about power, prioritise action over perfection and anything else I've learnt while here! (Like find joy in queuing for ice-cream).