Overstayed My Welcome

At times when I'm feeling really really low, I get the urge to drop everything over here and just go straight home.

Everything suddenly gets a little too overwhelming. A little too unreal.

Lately there have been a lot of current affairs programmes featured on national television questioning if Australia should start to discourage the growth of suburban enclaves.

You get to witness really insensitive blunt comments from people who are advocating "white Australia" sentiments.

These higly-educated people are saying how Asians and Africans should be stopped fom migrating to Australia. I'm not even going to imagine what the rest of Australia feels.

It's just things like this that makes me feel like I've overstayed my welcome.

But sometimes it takes the bad to bring out the good in other people.

This brings back memory of an incident of when I first started university last Feburary.

I had been riding on a tram with my Mum and aunt. This poorly dressed old man of caucasian origin, possibly slightly intoxicated, came up to us and just started to spew a really long string of undecipherable words.

The strangest thing was that while he kept going on and on the other passengers in the tram around us kept telling him to shut up and that nobody wanted to listen to what he was saying.

We were just confused by what was going on.

As all of this was going on, I still couldn't make out any of his words until I caught the word "chinese". I then began to sense that whatever he was saying couldn't be of any good nature.

Just when I was starting to feel really uncomfortable about all the unnecessary attention drawn to us, this tall young Australian man walked up to us and said what I thought was the nicest thing anyone could have said to us at that moment in time.

"Please don't listen to what he is saying.
I can assure you that the Australians here are all very happy."

"Thank you" was all that I could muster to that kind gentleman.