Fly to Melbourne and see Jenny and Jim for the first time in about 40 years.

We wake at 3:30 in the morning, hurriedly put on clothes and take our bags to the street where we are picked up by an Uber driver and deposited at Christchurch airport by 4:10. We caffeinate, buy some Hendricks to take to Oz and, with the two-hour time change, arrive in Melbourne at 7:45.

Cynthia gets a new SIM card; we get metro passes that we find out later could have been a version for seniors had we thought to ask (or the counter clerk thought to offer), find an ATM for a cash infusion, and hunt for Jim Jennings, with whom Cynthia lived for a year longer ago than either of them care to remember. He’s in the airport, within about 50 feet of us, but Cynthia is not sure what he looks like now, so we approach strangers and get an interesting variety of responses. Jim finally corrals us and our many bags, which we load into his Camry after a bit of a trek — Melbourne’s airport layout is very similar to BWI — and enter a maze of eight-lane superhighways on which cars and trucks crawl at a glacial pace.

Welcome to Melbourne, a city of two million and the four kangaroos David spots on the crest of gently rolling hills just off the parking lot named route 41. Jenny, Jim’s wife with whom Cynthia lived in Oz in a group house with Jim but before Jim and Jenny became an item, says that seeing a roo so close to the airport and city would be unusual enough that it would make the nightly news.

Jenny and Jim live in Williamstown, a beautiful suburb on a bay about a half-hour metro ride west of the city centre. The neighborhood is a mix of old wood and modern concrete-and-glass, one- and two-story homes on tree-lined streets with names like Bayview and Tobruk Crescent, the street where they live across from one of the many houses Jim, himself, built. The four of us chat in their house for a while until Cynthia and David metro into the city and walk around Flinders Street Station and Chinatown, where graffiti wall paintings have reached a high art.

We’re in a bit of a daze because we’ve been on the road since three and because Oz is so overwhelmingly larger and more cosmopolitan and crowded and busy than the much smaller places we’ve been for the past five weeks. We have to watch where we walk or we’ll bump into people, which happened all of twice in all of New Zealand. The tall, glittering glass buildings that line the Yarra River are separated from each other by wide empty spaces. They are beautiful. The architecture of commercial buildings here is clearly the result of some serious competitive entrepreneurial spirit by the entities whose names appear on the tops of the structures.

One building is named the Eureka building, after the Eureka Stockade, which was the scene of bloody fighting between gold miners who refused to pay a licensing fee to the British government that controlled Oz at the time — current wisdom adds that the miners liked their grog a bit over much and had become bellicose before they all fell into a dead sleep/drunken stupor/take your pick — and a regiment of redcoats who attacked them with rifle in the early morning. Twenty-three miners were killed/murdered/served their just desserts/take your pick (seems to depend on one’s depth of trade unionism). The tall, thin, basically rectangular glass building has a large but thin rectangle of floors at its top, offset at an angle from the building below it. Beneath it a very thin red rectangle drops straight down about 10 stories. The offset box at the top glows gold in the sun, representing the gold of the miners and the red is their blood, dripping from it.

We metro back to much sleepier and boutique-ee Williamstown — the three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath houses on their block average around 2.5 million Australian — and have a lovely dinner with easy conversation and trundle off to bed.

Our first cosmopolitan day in Oz.