Melbourne

The past 3 days, Julie and I have been enjoying a wonderfully long weekend in Melbourne. We knew we had to take one more trip before the semester was over, and Melbourne was on both of our lists. We had a great time exploring the city and relaxing but, as with Cairns, I once again confirmed that I made the right choice by studying abroad in Sydney. While both of the other cities I've visited have been great, there is no where else in Australia that I think I could have loved for an entire semester. 

A few key differences between Melbourne and Sydney:
1. Public transit - Sydney is all about buses and trains, Melbourne is all about trams. Like, San Francisco style, but literally all over the city. The tram is their primary mode of transportation, which is very old-school and fairly weird to see, but it definitely fit with the feeling of the city.
2. Cost - I'm not sure what world I've been living in where prices in Sydney seemed reasonable, but Melbourne was expensive. Julie and I both spent a lot more money than we were intending, and it makes me even more excited to buy "cheap" things back in MN!
3. Walkability - Melbourne is so easy to walk around. We learned the layout of the city in about a day, and were able to walk anywhere we wanted without using public transit. That would be impossible in Sydney, where walking anywhere takes much more time than you want to invest. Safe to say, we were pretty tired after lugging our backpacks all over the city.
4. Free things - While Melbourne is definitely more expensive, there were way more things to do for free while in the city. We visited two museums, the Melbourne Museum and the Australian Center for Moving Image, absolutely free - as well as exploring gardens, free comedy shows, and landmarks. 

While the two cities were very different, Sydney has come to feel like home, and I appreciate it in a way that I don't think I will ever appreciate another Australian city. That being said, our time in Melbourne was well-spent, and without further ado, a summary of our travels:


Friday
Our trip to Melbourne began with a 4:30 a.m. taxi ride to the airport. With a 6 a.m. flight, it seemed really late to be leaving, but domestic flight security is so lax that even though we didn't arrive at the airport until around 4:50, we still had over half an hour of time to kill before boarding the plane. As you are likely aware, I am not a morning person in the least. In this situation, it paid off, as I was asleep before the plane took off and didn't wake up again until after we had landed! I'm not sure how it's possible to sleep through take off and landing, but it happened. Once we got there, we were stuck on the plane on the tarmac for over half an hour, causing us to miss the shuttle we had scheduled for 8 a.m. Luckily, we were able to book another one that took us to the City Centre of Melbourne.

Hostel check-in wasn't until 11 a.m., so we stopped at a cafe for some breakfast when we arrived, and then headed to the Queen Victoria Markets. Like the markets I've been to in Sydney, this one was filled with a lot of tourist-y items, and a ton of fresh fruit. It was by far the biggest market I've seen, and Julie and I spent upwards of 2 hours wandering the aisles. Since I've already done major souvenir shopping, I tried to keep my spending to a minimum!

If I wouldn't have had to transport it home, I would have bought one!

Eventually, we left the market and set off to find our hostel. We quickly discovered that our hostel was a ways out of the city - and a very long walk when you have a heavy backpack. After walking for much too long, we made it to our hostel, The Nunnery. It was cute, and very clean, a huge step up from our Cairns hostel! We were sharing a room with 10 other people, all of whom turned out to be incredibly friendly and helpful. We spent a while getting settled before heading off for lunch.

One of the people from CAPA, Sarah, had recommended that we go eat at Lord of the Fries (clever, right?), a vegetarian restaurant. Since Julie is a vegetarian, I was completely up for going to eat there, and ate like an American...veggie burger, fries, and a Coke (old habits die hard?). Julie got to eat her first hot dog in I don't even know how long, but the food was delicious and not too expensive. 

We spent Friday afternoon going our separate ways - Julie went to explore the street art that is famous and Melbourne, and I went to Rod Laver Arena where the Australian Open is played! I was in absolute heaven during the time I was there. I spent a while just exploring the grounds and watching a tournament that was going on before getting a tour of the dressing rooms, media room, wall of champions, and a couple other things. Unfortunately, we couldn't go on to the main court because The Script was setting up for their Saturday night show, but it looks very different in the off-season anyway. We learned that the main court is only used for tennis during the weeks of the Australian Open, and serves a different purpose for the entire rest of the year. The retractable roof is also closed 100% of the time, other than during the tournament. After the tour, I was leaving and found one of the outdoor arenas completely empty...not even embarrassed to say that a lot of selfies were taken there. 

Djokovic!

Rod Laver Arena <3

Inside the locker room for the Top 30 players!

Gotta love Andre Agassi

There were 2 Aussie Open champions in 1977 - the tournament moved from January to December that year, making for 2 winners.

The three tennis greats

The Wall of Champions

Media room at Rod Laver Arena

Selfies, all day.

A jumping picture in memory of my tennis days!

Senior picture status

One thing Julie and I learned on the trip is that we are professional nappers. I got back from my tennis tour and Julie was already asleep in her bed, and fell asleep not too long after. We woke up from our naps about two hours later...I guess doing nothing is exhausting? We grabbed some Vietnamese food for dinner, and then had a casual night at a bar called The Alchemist. There, we discovered our favorite bartenders of the trip, Ryan Gosling and Jude Law lookalikes - need I say more?

Our afternoon naps didn't stop us from being tired, so we headed home fairly early so we would have energy the next day.


Saturday
Saturday morning we slept in nice and late, and found that the other 10 people in our room were gone by the time we got up! The day before, we met our Norwegian roommate Kjersti, who had just flown in from Norway on Friday morning. We decided the 3 of us should spend the day together and went off to the Melbourne Museum.

The museum was awesome - we spent over two hours wandering through the 7 different exhibits learning about animals and evolution, sea life in Australia, the human mind and body, the rainforest, and Melbourne history. It was a good way to spend the morning. After grabbing some lunch we (obviously) napped before heading down to Federation Square and the Yarra River. Federation Square is at the center of town, and there are always free shows happening and lots of places to just hang out and enjoy the sunshine. 

Melbourne Museum

LOOK AT THIS SPIDER!!

The Rainforest Exhibit

We spent a little time there, and then Julie and I decided to get tickets to one of the many shows happening during the Comedy Festival in Melbourne. The festival goes on for a month, and there are thousands of shows during that time - we didn't want to miss out on the experience. Having heard of none of the acts, we got a recommendation and got tickets to a show called The Writers, which ended up being pretty funny. We didn't understand some of the Australian inside jokes, but it was still a good time overall.

From there, we reunited with Kjersti for another evening out. We stopped at a couple places, and eventually ended up at The Alchemist again (our Three Monkeys of Melbourne?). It was another good night, and we were thrilled to learn that Kjersti would be in Sydney in just a few days so we could see her again!


Sunday
We weren't aware of it before we arrived, but check out time at the Nunnery is at 9:30 a.m. Julie and I got up pretty early, and weren't thrilled about hauling our backpacks around the city for an entire day! Our first stop in the morning was Fitzroy Gardens - which was basically just a giant garden. Cool, buuuut, we didn't spend too much time there. On our way to finding breakfast, we went right by Hosier Lane, the street with all the graffiti! It was so cool to see it - everywhere was absolutely covered in spray paint. There were so many great designs on the walls, and I couldn't believe that there was a whole area of the city where it was completely okay to cover everything with graffiti. 

After a delicious brunch, we went to the Australian Center for Moving Image - which is basically a museum devoted to the history of TV, movies, and video games. We spent a lot of time wandering around and learning the history, and I definitely killed some time playing Sonic the Hedgehog on one of the computers. There was a lot of interesting history, but it got hard to remember after a while so we spent a lot of time just wandering and looking around.

The next 6 hours after that were literally spent sitting in Federation Square. They had all kinds of lounge chairs scattered around the open space, and we pulled a couple under a huge umbrella for some relaxation. Melbourne was small enough that we had already done everything we wanted to do, and were perfectly content to sit all day. We spent a lot of time people watching, listening to the shows on stage, reading, and a little bit of napping. Part way through the day, it started to downpour, trapping Julie and I under our umbrella for around an hour. The square emptied out completely, but we didn't want to walk around and get soaked, so we continued to hide under our little shelter!

Everyone hiding from the rain

Julie and I looked just like these people under our own umbrella!

It finally stopped raining, and we grabbed a quick dinner before getting on our shuttle back to the airport. We got there wayyyy too early, and ended up getting to our gate before 6 for our 8:45 flight, which was eventually delayed to about 9:15. We finally got back to our apartment around 11, and were thrilled when we did!


Overall, we had a great time exploring another Australian city, but were so happy to come back to Sydney. We also finally accepted that our time in this wonderful country is coming to an end - and I've become incredibly excited to be back in Minneapolis in 2 weeks! Only a few blog posts left to write in these next couple weeks - hopefully I still have a few more interesting tales to tell as well :)