Melbourne was still where it had always been. A few things had changed (there's a JB Hi-Fi in Bourke St. where a discount clothing shop had been, 3RRR have moved out to Brunswick, and new trains had replaced most, but not all, of the old Hitachi trains), but generally, it felt as if I hadn't been away. People I knew were still there, and many of the familiar landmarks were as I remembered them. Oh, and EMI are still releasing corrupt CDs there.
My flight to Melbourne was a Qantas flight, whereas my flight back was with British Airways. Which are roughly similar, except that Qantas has better entertainment systems in cattle-class (you can actually play Tetris-like games on the screen in front of you), whereas BA has better in-flight duty-free shopping. The BA seats also had regular headphone sockets, thus allowing one to use something better than the craptacular headsets provided by airlines. (I had my Sennheiser PX200s with me, and they worked remarkably well; I'd say that actual noise-cancelling headphones are probably overkill.)
I briefly considered buying a PSP in Singapore (where they are out, unlike in Europe), though thought better of it, partly because of a lack of compelling titles (I've heard good things about Katamari Damacy, though that's not out on the PSP), and partly because no-one has figured out how to run user code on a current one yet.
Anyway, during my visit, I took some photos documenting Melbourne's café culture (the like of which I haven't seen in London); these photos may be found here.
Just a pointless comment: your week away coincided exactly with Ed and me being in holland. The first official blogger holiday week?
Heh, yeah the new JBs. When I was there a few weeks I was all "what's this", not long after I'd been in the Elizabeth St one, so I decided to have a look. An hour later...