Entry for April 12, 2007: Easter in Melbourne

My mate met me at her local train station, and we spent the rest of the morning chatting and shifted sun lounges around as we chased the sunny spots tracking across her overgrown back yard
After a bit we decided to go out for pizza in the city and I insisted that I wanted to ride a tram. We don’t have trams in Sydney and it was a bit weird riding in a vehicle that was train shaped, but was cruising through the middle of road bound car traffic.
We ended up in a groovy pub. She was drinking white and I had red, and we talked about the feminist position on scrunching and folding, the burgeoning popularity of tapas in Melbourne, and how it’s hard for a single girl to get ‘knocked up’ these days as guys have realised that the government will hunt them down and make them pay for the upkeep of the sprog (as a result condoms are gaining in popularity again.)
What I thought was interesting was that she expressed the opinion, that single woman are more interested in having a guy around as a babysitter, then sucking his bank account dry.
We ended up back in my hotel room, attacking a complimentary bottle of red that we found sitting on a cupboard (I think it was complimentary as I wasn’t charged, and no one appeared to claim it.)

The next day my hostess had to study, so I did what I normally do when I’m in a new place and explored.
Melbourne cental is all wide roads, or narrow lanes crammed with interesting shops and cafes.
Sydney is condensed and over bearing and choked with exhaust spewing cars and buses, by comparison.

I found a big art gallery. There was an exhibition on Bollywood which didn’t interest me, but a display of the history of exotic sneakers did.
School holidays are on so there was a children’s activity where a pile of Lego had been spilled out on a table the foyer.
Since this was an art gallery they couldn’t just use normal Lego.
The only colour available to the children was white.
Where did the gallery staff hide all the other colours?
The children were building tall towers of shiny white Lego, which looked great but there didn’t seem to be any childish chaos to the structures, and I couldn’t help thinking that the kids were being prompted.

Now for the travel details bit.

I flew to Melbourne with Virgin Blue (cheap flights but you have to pick the right times. It was astoundingly cheap to fly back on Easter Sunday.)
Virgin has this handy web check in where the passenger can save time by printing out a bar-coded travel document.
Caught the cheapest transport to the city on the Skybus (about fifteen bucks, I was told by a taxi driver that cab fare out there is at least forty-five)
Melbourne public transport is amazing. Trains and trams run all over the place and the yellow cabs fill in the bits in-between.
I stayed at the Hotel Rendezvous (328 flinders street)
The hotel was a lot nicer then I thought it would be.
It’s an old fashioned building which has been brought up to modern standards.

The room was small but clean and I didn’t mind not having a view as all I was going to be doing in there was sleeping and bathing.
The staff were really nice and friendly.

To be continued…

Entry for April 10, 2007: Easter in Melbourne

I decided I needed a change of scenery so I spent a few days down in Melbourne over Easter.
Melbourne is one of those cities where I feel instantly at home.
Glasgow, Fethiye, Wellington, Nuremburg, and London are others that I have instantly grown an attachment to.
The opposite would be cities such as Las Vagus which make my skin crawl.

My home town of Sydney is notorious for being sunny but soulless.
Melbourne is known for being cultured and damp.
Good Friday morning was cold and wet and swathed in cloud when I left my flat and caught the bus to the airport.
While I was in Melbourne I enjoyed three straight days of bright sparkly solar radiation.
Some folk reckon that global warming is to blame for this topsy turvey weather.
If this is true, then Melbourne and England will become known for being ‘fun in the sun,’ while Sydney and Spain will assume the mantle of ‘soggy Sao.’

I had arranged to meet a local I knew from the internet in the city centre, and not finding anyone waiting, zapped off a sms.
They replied to my cheerfully probing text message, by pleading a hangover, and extending an offer for me to hang out at their place in the suburbs until I could check into my hotel at two (they sent me very detailed instructions on which train to take where.)
I’d been in motion since five that morning, so the first thing I did in my search for breakfast was to ignore the fast food chains, and hunted up a proper ‘greasy spoon’ called the Blackjack (run by a very cute Asian family,) to have a serving of bacon and eggs on toast, accompanied by a very fine mug of coffee.

With a full belly and a system charged with caffeine, I approached the foreign train station.
Nice building. Had a proper ‘modern Euro’ feeling about it.
I was standing in front of the ticket machine in the train station wearing my ‘humm, how does this work’ face when a guy walking past gave me his ticket with a couple of hours of time left on it (nothing like this sort of kismet for nurturing in one an affection for a place.)
One of the nice things about travelling is re-learning things, such as how to board a train. The carriage doors on Melbourne trains don’t open auto-magically. They require the effort of arm to yank them open.

To be continued…