Melbourne

 

Just back from our week long Great Ocean Walk, catching up on our time in Melbourne prior to the walk....

 On May 17th, post our stay on Kangaroo Island, we flew to Melbourne, the capital of Victoria, and the the 2nd largest city in Australia with a population of over 4 million.  Australia has a landmass roughly comparable to the U.S. (excluding Alaska and Hawaii), but a population of just 26 million (compared to our 336 million) – I think that in and of itself explains a lot of the differences between the two countries!  Over 50% of the Australian population lives in just 5 cities:  Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide (we have, or will be, visiting all but Brisbane on this trip).  Like most big cities, Melbourne was filled with skyscrapers and mobbed with a true multicultural blend of people.  Our AirBnB overlooked the famous Victoria Markets


and was on the edge of Chinatown, which had every variety of Asian food you could possible imagine (we opted for an amazing Peking Duck dinner)


We walked a lot of the city, enjoying the amazing street art (some of you may recall that AC/DC was an Australian band)

visited the botanical gardens along the Yarra River that runs through the city (which reminded us a bit of the Charles River in Boston; the other similarity is the "four seasons in one day" weather here)


and saw a couple of shows:  "&Juliet" – made even more entertaining by the cast’s Australian accents, and "Once" - both worth seeing if you haven't.

Melbourne bills itself as the live music capital of Australia (as well as its coffee capital - try ordering just a "regular coffee" - not so easy), so we headed out to find some live music.  We found it at The Drunken Poet (voted one of the 10 Best Irish Pubs in the World (Outside Ireland)) - though definitely more drunks than poets!

We even convinced one of the pubs to put on a Celtics playoff game at 10:30 in the morning (though we had to promise that the game would be over before the broadcast of the local footie match began!)  As I write this, we've just learned that the Celtics have tied the series up 3-3 on that miraculous Derrick White shot that I'm sure you've all watched a thousand times by now.  Pretty sure what we'll be doing tomorrow morning when Game 7 is on!


Well, as you can probably tell, we took full advantage of the city - despite the fact that being in a big city was a huge culture shock after our stay on KI.  Props also to Katina and Bryce, a wonderful young couple we met several years ago on one of our wildlife conservation gigs in Africa, who spent an afternoon showing us around Geelong, one of Melbourne's nearby suburbs.  By the end of our 5 days in Melbourne, we were very much looking forward to heading back out to the countryside, which - as you will learn in my next post - was an incredible experience!

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