Friday night in Melbourne was a bit of a washout – well for my purposes it was. I wanted somewhere where I could site outside and have a beer and a smoke whiling away the hours before my flight – my flight was at 6.25am Saturday morning so I figured I’d head to the airport and sit it out.

I found one place that suited my purposes – the Melbourne Hotel or the such but it closed after 15 minutes because it wasn’t busy enough. Not busy enough – at 9pm on a Friday night. Not many pubs back home have a similar problem of people not wanting to drink in them, but then again I am getting the idea that with 20 million people in a country 1.5 times the size of Europe there is a lot of competition for limited livestock.

So I headed to the airport and waited it out, dining on a breakfast at McDonalds as nothing else was open – I had survived on nothing but fruit and yoghurt on my trip around the great ocean road and was saving myself for a laksha at the airport, but McDonalds it was to be…