Every journey starts the same way as

the bus leaves the filthy, tiny, jolimont under , passes through what passes for a main road in my home city out and skirting the into open countryside, past the small town that had to stop running its annual pumpkin festival after a hundred thousand people descended on it, several years in a row, past the roadside McDonalds that every single school trip stopped at, which was more often than not the highlight of the trip, past the roadside Hungry Jacks I stopped at once, driving this way, at 10:00 pm, once and never again, over the three gorges that I will one day explore, and into

the underpass, what would it be like to walk through if there were no cars, how long it would take to get from one side to the other, which spits you out directly in the centre of the city. The bus weaves through streets that were never built for buses, , , , arriving eventually at central, and into

the city itself, , ,

... ...

this city has always felt a lttle bit ruinous to me, like the whole lot of it is about to crumble into pieces, like the moss and creeping vines are just about to engulf the whole place

but it has felt that way for decades and it still hasn't fallen apart