I flew down to Melbourne last Friday morning because Zoe and I had tickets to see Culture Club at the Rod Laver arena (they were fantastic but enough about that). The journey is very cheap and straightforward as we only live 15 minutes from Newcastle Airport and I was in Melbourne before 10am with my own tour guide (Zoe) to show me around.
We started off by visiting Monash University, where Zoe is now studying and I was struck by how similar it is to the University of East Anglia where she got her degree in England.
Next stop was the beautiful Shrine of Remembrance. It is a very impressive structure in the middle of parkland with a museum in the basement and the building has been constructed so that on the 11th November at 11am the sun shines through a tiny skylight directly on to the memorial plaque in the centre of the room. The whole place is surrounded by art spaces sunk into the ground and trees planted to commemorate battles of the first and second world wars.
We then wandered through Treasury Gardens and Fitzroy Gardens, which are both beautiful and have plenty of plants in flower even though it is now the middle of winter. Fitzroy Gardens has a gorgeous conservatory full of tropical and semi tropical plants and is also home to Captain Cook's cottage. Zoe and Ian have had many discussions about this as Captain Cook never lived in Australia but, when we visited it we realised the cottage had been exported from England and reassembled in Fitzroy Gardens so we bought Ian a stubby holder from the souvenir shop to prove it did exist.
It is really easy to get around in Melbourne as the trams are straightforward and the city centre is built on a grid system so I didn't even get lost when I ventured in by myself on day two while Zoe was at work. She joined me at lunchtime and we took in Prahran Market which has loads of unusual food stalls including a mussel wagon and a home made Turkish delight stall where there were stacks of Turkish delight in every colour imaginable.
It was the Queen's Birthday weekend, Australians get the day off on the Monday as a public holiday and I just had to share this poster in one of the pub windows. Everywhere was quite jolly with an atmosphere only achieved when everyone knows they don't have to go to work on Monday. We took in St. Kilda, a really vibrant beachside suburb very near to Zoe and Shaun's home which is the home of Melbourne's Luna Park and where we walked along the pier and spotted fairy penguins hidden amongst the rocks. We walked along the banks of the Yarra river in the city past endless restaurants, cafes and bars wondering why we kept passing the occasional Batman or Transformer until we reached the convention centre and saw that Comic Con was being hosted there and we were surrounded by people dressed as comic characters.
With very sore feet from all that walking, we set off for the airport for our flight back to Newcastle airport as Zoe was coming back to spend a week in Lemon Tree Passage with us.