As I boarded the Air New Zealand flight from Narita things automatically felt different: The lack of bowing, blond haired people, English newspapers and greetings in English. The pilot came on and announced that we have the New Zealand trampoline team on board, who had won gold medals here in Japan and gave them a big congratulation over the intercom. But the icing on the cake came when he announced it was one of the airhostess' birthdays and if we could all wish her a good day. At the end of the 11 hour flight to Auckland, children from the trampoline team came through the isles handing out sweets which I learnt was customary for Air New Zealand to select small children to do this "privilege". The whole system was totally alien to me and seemed so small-town-village-like-friendly behaviour for a major airline. I loved it.

I had a quick lay over freezing Auckland before flying to Brisbane. As I can't sleep on planes I'd been up since the day before and had 18 hours of travelling time behind so needless to say I was tired and wandering round Brisbane not knowing how to get to my friends house was not fun plus that big shopping spree in China had added about 15kg to my suitcase which I now think was a bad idea.

I hopped on the CityCat a river boat ferry system similar to the water taxis in Venice and got off and found my way to Tom's house. Now Tom and I met briefly 3 years ago on an Egyptian Nile Cruise and I remembered his parents telling me if I was ever in Brisbane I'd have a place to stay. I took them up on the offer and sure enough they said yes.

I think normally I would be apprehensive about doing that thinking it would be too much trouble and would not want to inconvenience anyone. But with Soran's influence of just getting in touch with anyone you know on far flung corners and asking to stay it turns out more than not people are more than happy to go out of their way to welcome you. Mom actually says you're doing people a favour by making their week a bit more interesting in people's normal day to day lives! Maybe that's true. That's also such a British mentality of "oh no lets not inconvenience anyone, best to stay out of peoples hair, mind your own business" type deal.

So I turned up at Toms house with only giving them a couple days notice to a sign on the front door reading "Welcome Kate, the doors unlocked, your beds made up the in spare room, help yourself to the fridge, make yourself at home and someone will be home soon". I thought wow. What more could you ask for! Sue came home from shopping and had dinner with the parents and the brothers all round my age.

We watched a dodgy DVD made by the crew on the Nile Cruise which we had a copy of too - probably the most embarrassing home video to date. Apart from touring around the tombs and boat trips, the footage was mainly of me and Sarah, me, drunk on rum and cokes dancing in the disco on the boat to Shakira's hips don't lie and the Arabic versions of a few popular songs when I was 18. Plus with an Arab cameraman obviously pointing the camera upwards so he could get a better view of the foreign girl's asses. That would have been embarrassing to watch with your own family let alone someone else's'! Thank goodness the dodgy quality cut that video short before the last night where everyone dressed up in Egyptian fez', gallabeya's, and sequined hats. The rest of the evening we chatting over delicious red wine which I had been greatly looking forward too.

The time was coming when I would soon know the fate of my summer with the publication of my exam results soon to be released. If I passed I could stay travelling if I failed I would have to fly home within the next week and spend the next few weeks revising to re-take in August so literally meaning the end of the summer holiday and coming home to England a failure! Needless to say there I was under a lot of pressure. One night I had three nightmares one after the other all involving work, school and my relationship. The first was that I was back at work closing after and really horrible night but everyone had converted to Islam and didn't drink anymore with my bar manager even wearing a burka to work. The second involved me failing my exam and having to fly home which was on the cards and the third dream involved me rushing to an airport to fly to meet Soran somewhere but I left my passport at home. So there, I guess quite simply my biggest fears shown very bluntly!

I met Soran the next day in Brisbane, I just walked around the area he said he was in and lucky for me a 6 foot something Japanese guy with an afro is pretty distinguishable so had no trouble spotting him. We made our way to different car rental companies hoping to rent a car and drive up the coast but not realising it was the winter holidays every car in the city had been rented already. So we made our way by train which actually turned into quite of a mission. Japan has spoiled me, I expect a train to anywhere to be running every 3 minutes and at every corner you can pick up fast, tasty healthy food to go but no Australia is very much a take your time kind of place. No pre-packed sandwiches or fast regular trains here. It took us about 6 hours to get to a place that would take an hour and a half by car.

We arrived in Nambour on the Sunshine Coast to lots of rain and grey clouds but met Mark and his friend from work Renee at the train station who drove us to Marks house. Mark worked with Soran at All Star Lanes in Brick Lane for a couple years and we couldn't have lucked out more. His house was literally 20meters from the beach! Even though we didn't have the weather it was still great to see and feel the ocean being right on your doorstep. Being a very quiet town which doesn't see many visitors Mark and his mother Linda were very excited to see us.

We had a beer out on the patio and the mom even gave us little presents wrapped up, it was so welcoming! We went out to "the best place in town" with Mark and Renee and had some really lovely pizza and gnocchi, great but really nothing on Japanese food. Coolum where we were staying was a typical Queensland seaside town, very small and where everyone knows each other. It's the type of place where you walk in the bar or restaurant and people turn around to see who has just walked in as if it's their living room and they're seeing whose home.

We spent the rest of the day touring around the sunshine coast with Mark. We stopped in Noosa and walked around the national park. It was just gorgeous. A long white sandy beach stretching about 3 miles backed by lush vegetation. It was defiantly a tourist spot but development had really been kept to a minimum with no buildings over 2 stories on the beach front. We came in winter so the weather wasn't great but it also wasn't as bad as the locals kept going on about how freezing and awful the weather was. Was pretty much a typical day in May in England.

We ate fish n chips on top of a windy roof in Moollaaba at the bottom of the coast which was just delicious, nearly as good as Hanburry's in Babbacoombe. The whole coast was so relaxing with just a handful of people in each of the tiny towns dotted along the coast. Such a contrast from everywhere I've seen in the few months from London (7million people) to Tokyo (12million) to Beijing (22million).

Linda cooked us sausage and mash for dinner much to my excitement, I'd missed mash potatoes so much in Japan. We then made our way down to the place where Mark works which is a café by day and tapas bar in the night. There was a musician playing really chilled acoustic versions of MGMT and a few reggae tracks. He was excellent very similar sound to Xavier Rudd. We shared a bottle of red wine and then headed to "The Surf Club". It was apparently a must for us to see the small town red-neck culture first hand and play "the pokies" an addictive slot machine type game.

We walked into the bar and got told off by the bar ladies as we hadn't signed in! So many fights break out so they need you to sign in. after an ID check we were good to go. It was the worst bar I've ever seen - so characterless with people just sitting in silence staring around the room at each other. We quickly had one drink and no now never to go back to a surf club in a small town. It was like a Weather spoons crossed with a Walkabout with the lights turned up so bright highlighting every stain on the cheap aluminous blue carpet. Never again. We got some beers in the drive through bottle store and headed home.

I woke up nervously to check the computer as the clock had just gone midnight in England and results were up on my university website. I passed! Thank goodness! If I would have been in London it would have been 12 midnight and I would have gone out celebrating but at 9am we decided to climb a mountain instead. Coolum Rock is Australia's second highest after Ayres. It was hard but great to see the whole Sunshine Coast and see all the places we drove round the day before.

I walked around Coolum which takes about 10 minutes from one end to the other. It's a nice little town but SO quiet and everything shuts down by 10pm. We went back to Marks place and had champagne and tapas with Linda, the mom. Thank you Mark and Linda for the lovely meal! We stayed listening to a Spanish lounge DJ and chatting with the waitresses, all of whom like Mark are living back at home, working two or three jobs while saving and planning for their next escape to travel or work overseas.

I like Australia, for one I am still overjoyed that I can read and understand everyone. I can order from myself, ask directions if I need to and join in conversations without someone directly including me. It feels very much like South Africa but with less crime and more friendly open people. The scenery is breath taking, white beaches, lush greenery, clouds like you would see over African savannah. Everyone is so lovely and friendly too. I'll generalise here but the Australians living in London really give their country a bad name. In my experience at the bar the only thing worse than serving Australians, would be serving drunken Australians. I have the image of loud, obnoxious, arrogant Australian men who get very drunk and rowdy very fast but I guess that's a good generalization of British men too. But so far everyone I've met has been so friendly, polite and helpful to us. People share a lot more small talk and casual conversation with strangers than people back home. And that's not because I live in a capital city, in English small towns too it doesn't happen so often. The English are very reserved people, compared to the Aussies or the Americans, that is, until you get one drunk.

We arrived in Melbourne on Saturday night. It was cold, windy and cloudy feeling very similar to March in London. Ranna met us at Southern Cross Station. Ranna is a friend from London who worked at Bincho a Japanese yakitori place in Soho that all of the Japan London crew like to go on Mondays for their £1 sake boxes. She was lovely to us; she bought us tram tickets and showed us the way back to hers. We met her Yorkshire boyfriend and his brother and Swiss girlfriend; we shared pizza and wine before heading out. It was very funny to hear girlfriends, Ranna and Anna (Swiss) speaking English with Yorkshire accents that they've picked up from their boyfriends.

We headed out to central Melbourne in search of a bar where one of Soran's friends was working that night. Stepping off the tram felt like we had just landed in the harbour in Torquay on a Saturday night and with a big regional football game going on the atmosphere was even worse. Drunken girls falling over in the streets, hoards of men on the prowl and crowds gathered outside souvlaki shops (Melbourne's version on kebabs joints). We had the address of the bar but couldn't find it only realising we were giving the wrong address in the first place and after being rejected by a bar in search for a drink because I didn't have my passport and probably the fact that we weren't dressed up to the Nines like everyone else seemed to be. The whole area felt too pretentious and flashy for my liking, I had really had enough.

There seems to be a massive problem with drinking culture and not only for teenagers. Ranna's boyfriends 50 something year old parents get their ID checked when they visit its ludicrous. Plus to stop people drinking on the streets there is literally no place to buy alcohol in the city centre, you would have to catch a tram to a bottle store in the suburbs to even buy a beer in a shop. The same strict rules apply with smoking. Not only is smoking banned in any establishment it is also nearly banned outside, you can't just sit down at an outside café and smoke a cigarette in open air. Needless to say drinking and driving is an absolute no-no. However for some reason I had an image in my head of very relaxed rules much like in South Africa where people are very tough who don't like being told what they can and cannot do. Also images of a Wild West atmosphere where rules don't really apply, maybe that's true outside the cities however.

So not the best first impression of Melbourne - cold, windy, with a nanny state atmosphere that even England would mock. However we made our way to Queen Victoria market with Ranna and Olly and had a lovely afternoon with them buying lovely deli cheeses and wandering the streets of Melbourne. They took us to a pub in the city which looked just like a standard English chain pub. With the greyness outside while drinking a frothy stout in a warm cosy pub it felt just like winter in England. We took a stroll down by the river and rented bicycles and went for a ride on the banks which looked really like south bank with buskers and street performers. I was actually really happy it feels so like London after being so unfamiliar with Tokyo, I felt right at home here.

Melbourne is known as being the cultural centre of Melbourne with lots of live music and art events happening all the time. Away from the monotonous city centre chain stores and coffee shops there are small laneways lined with vegetarian cafes, vintage clothing stores, vinyl shops and tiny wine bars. I was in heaven. There are just endless little streets upon streets of so many cafes and bars. And aside from the city centre there are pockets of little areas that are like miniature Camden and Brick Lanes. The people are also very relaxed and friendly and having so many of Soran's friends living here we really got the feel of the place as they each took us around to whatever they thought we should see.

We spent the rest of the evening relaxing with Ranna drinking wine and eating our goodies from the market. I was kicking myself we didn't have a BBQ because at the end of the market they were selling trays of the biggest, juiciest steaks I had ever seen for about £5 a fraction of the price because everywhere was closing.

We headed out later that night in hope to meet Lois who we couldn't track down the night before and were surprised to learn she had already left when we got to the Black Pearl in Brunswick St, one of the many pockets of coolness. We asked the bartender if he knew Lois, who bartends at a nice bar in the city and sure enough they did. And as usual before we knew we were 5 cocktails down and started doing shots with the bartenders who actually knew a lot of the bartenders that we know in London and Melbourne. It was a great night that unfortunately ended with an expensive cab ride home.

I was soon beginning to realise that this city of amazing bars was destroying my budget very fast so being a brilliantly sunny day we were to spend no money and go out walking around the whole city and although fairly hung-over we managed to walk about 7 miles altogether around the beach and every park we could walk too. By 6 we met Merlin, a bartender from the famous tequila bar Green&Red, where Soran worked. He works in probably the fanciest cocktail bar in Melbourne called 1806, the year the word cocktail was first printed. They definitely had the best cocktail list I've ever seen and so it should be as it won the best in the world a few years back.

Merlin was one of these larger than life characters that you can just sit back and listen to while he regales you with stories. Much like watching TV character; Soran's description of my Dad and Alle's description of Matt.He gave us a tour of his bar showing us cocktail shakers through different time periods ranging from 1920s to the 1980s. We met him the next morning for brunch in the laneways and he looked exhausted. Robert Dinero was filming in Melbourne and had his PA call up Merlin to make martinis after he finished filming for the day, so he was up till 4am making martinis for Robert Dinero. We couldn't believe it.

After brunch he took us on a tour around his favourite bars in the city, popping in several places to say hello to his friends working at some really lovely bars. My favourite was one called Cookies which was in a beautiful art deco building with a roof top tiki bar on the 7th floor overlooking the whole city, another was called the Croft Institution. He took us through Chinatown and down a tiny ally way covered wall to wall with elaborate graffiti. It was apparently the bar that made the laneways of Melbourne famous where the bartenders where lab coats and serve cocktails in test tubes. All in the backstreets of Melbourne's you will find tiny ally's covered in street art, packed with tiny boutique bars and cafes with people sitting eating street food on green crates outside. It has a great grimy, dirty yet stylish East London feel.

We met Vespa and Krystal who were friends from All-star Lanes, at the crown plaza who showed us around the massive casinos. It was the first time I'd even been in a casino, it was huge. And to my surprise packed with elderly Chinese women gambling like there was no tomorrow. Apparently gambling is banned in China so planeloads of wealthy Chinese flock to Australia to gamble. We had a coffee with Vespa and Krystal who were both 2nd generation Italian-Australians. After WW2 there was a massive influx of Europeans as part of the keep Australia white immigration policy. As a result there are boroughs of Little Italy and a massive Greek community so I've been eating some of the best dolmades outside of Greece.

We were invited to dinner at Erika's house, who worked at Big Chill House across the road from Camino. We had a gorgeous 3 course home made meal in the weirdest setting. The house on the outskirts of Melbourne looked like it had not been decorated since 1976. Think avocado green toilet fittings, terracotta pots and low brown couches surrounding the electric tiled fire place. All that was missing was a living room pit. We sat on the floor with Erika her boyfriend Pete, Lois and her fiancé from England and another couple from their bar. It was like come dine with me in a 1970s time warp with several lean back tequila shots thrown in there.

The last day in Melbourne was spent on a whistle stop tour seeing all of Soran's friends in Melbourne and it was one of the most enjoyable days of the trip so far. Everyone knows that Soran knows everyone everywhere and it doesn't stop in London, it was so nice having so many people living here to show us how like they to spend there time. I don't think I've ever had such a personal insight to a city in such a short time of only spending a few days here. Melbourne is lovely and I could definitely see myself living here. Maybe someday I will.