Melbourne

OK I'd better start at the beginning.. Sunday night was spent doing laundry and packing preparing for the 5am wake up. Sandy was kind enough to put him self to bed. Note the embarrassing summer cut that he has to put up with. Poor old dog. :P

Some how I managed to jump out of bed at 5 and we were off to the airport. Turns out Sydney isn't as cranky about liquids as they are in Ottawa. We can take liquids on domestic flights and they don't even have to be in those explosive proof zip-loc baggies.

Tom and I were picked up by his friend Oskar and his mate James. Instead of driving straight in to Melbourne we took a detour to Geelong. It's just a small town with not much in it except a big mall. We had some brekky and drove to the city to do some exploring with them.

The charcoal chicken had a burned out roof. It amused me.

Tom and I stayed in the Hotel Grand Chancellor in the heart of downtown. It was right between the Greek district and China town which made for some interesting food options. We did a bit of walking around but a good chunk of the afternoon was sleep. We definitely started feeling the early start. :P Finding a place for dinner turned into a bit of a trek. We almost had hot pot but found that place really dodgey. The price seemed to keep changing. After more walking we decided on an Indian food place ordered and sat down only to be told 10minutes later that the building had to be evacuated due to a water leak near electrical wires. We got our food to go and it was very delicious. Later we met Oskar and James at the Prince of Wales Hotel... I'm still not used to calling bars hotels. This one was part pub part gay bar. As it turned out they happened to have a drag show on that night so we watched for a bit. It was really fun, I heard a lot of super old songs and saw many massive wigs.

From left to right: James, Oskar and Tom.

Day two started breakfast at a coffee and cake cafe. It was so hard not to buy one of everything. We recovered from the sugar with a walk around the city and across the bridge. I had discovered that there was a Batman Park and a Batman ave. So our plan was to find those. Before we did Oskar called and we decided to find and check out Brunswick St. When they finally found us it became very clear that Oskar was not such a great navigator... he thought we were driving on the other side of the river, which makes giving directions a little tricky. Once we made it to Brunswick St. The boys had a bit of a shopping spree. I had no idea that guys were so funny when they looked for clothes. They were getting ready for a double date. So we departed and had a quite night watching T.V. and the movie Speed racer, which I liked a lot more that I expected.

I should mention that Melbourne is one of the most beautiful and fun cities I've seen. They have a mix of Victorian buildings and very modern and funky buildings. There's little things and not such little things all over the place.

This is outside the actual library... it's what they do to bad buildings.

This is a University.

Central station with a tram.

Another style of tram. There was a third but it was ugly. lol.

For the most part the buildings that this bubble joined looked totally normal. It was a little surprise if you happened to look that way. :)

If you look closely in the bottom right hand corner you can see the front of one of the ugly gray trams. :P

Something just wasn't quite right about that hamburger... it may have been it's giant eye.



Unfortunately we didn't make it to Batman park. But this did me just fine. :)

The last sign says baby change.

Day three Tom and I furthered our exploration of the city and did a bit of shopping.. well we went into stores but didn't actually buy anything. Most of the stores were pretty expensive. For dinner we went to a really neat restaurant called Stalactites that appropriately had it's ceiling covered in plaster stalactites. It was open 24 hours so we went super late. Unfortunately the food wasn't as good as we'd hoped considering the price. Ah well.


We had breakfast in this mall right beside the old lead pipe and shot factory and the living wall.

This was right between the buildings above.

For our last day we had some big plans. We get brekky, go to a park and watch Timo play soccer for Sydney Uni, have coffee with Scott (yes Sara your Scotty) and then go to the Art Deco show that was the entire reason for my coming to Melbourne. Everything was going to plan up till the end of breakfast. We walked down the street we thought would lead us to the main road that would then take us to the soccer park. After not being able to find it we took a tram back to where we started to find where we missed it. Again it wasn't there so we went back in the other direction via tram but a little farther than before. This lead to the discovery of a fun street of stores so we took a shopping break. We had missed about half the game by this point but as the Art Deco show was on the same street we still had to find it. So we caught a third tram and after looking at a map behind us Tom realized that the street we wanted changed names... so we had passed it twice. I'm going to blame google maps for this one. :P

The Art Deco show was incredible. I couldn't take any pictures inside unfortunately so you'll have to take my word on it.
It turned out that Scott had to work all day so we didn't get to meet him. :( We did meet up with Timo beside the river which was really neat. It was a beautiful day so we sat in the sun and chatted for a bit. Then Tom and I had to head back and jump on our plane. Perhaps it was because we had got a puzzle book and were distracted.. the flight back felt like it only took 30 minutes. It was crazy.

This car really reminded of Ringo's car from the Beatles Yellow Submarine movie. :)

Today is nice and warm but I had a very early and unpleasant start to it. It went something like this.... I was asleep dreaming and in my dream something was tickling my arm and it didn't stop. I had no idea what it was but it kind of felt nice and I woke up a bit. Opening my eyes I look down towards my arm and see a very large cockroach doing laps around my elbow. I have never jumped out of bed so fast. It then ran behind the bed so for the rest of the morning as I tried to get back to sleep I kept thinking it had crawled back on me and I kept jolting awake. Well Simone you are now not the only one to hold a cockroach... though I didn't do it by choice.