In just over a week I'll be heading to Melbourne for a sabbatical of most of a year - my first extended stay not only in Australia but in the other hemisphere.
I've given this blog the somewhat cryptic name Sunny Side Up because I'll be missing fall and winter in my native northern hemisphere and so will go from sunny summer to sunny summer to sunny summer before I see winter again. Summer's actually my least favorite season, perhaps because I spent most of my childhood in sunny Southern California pining for change, but I expect I'll have enough of seasonal change: Melbourne is about as far south of the Equator as San Francisco (its fellow 1850s gold rush city) is north of it.
This Hobodyer world map - notice the correct placement of the Equator in the center of the map, not usual in world maps - makes clear that it is just prejudice to think I'm going "down under" or even to "the ends of the earth." What better vantage point for viewing a world turned (as it seems to some of us in the crowded and cantankerous northern hemisphere) upside-down by injustice, moral laziness and superstition?
