5 Days in Melbourne

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January 26th 2007

Published: February 1st 2007

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OwZat

Sleeping Arrangements

Andrew & Steves bed in the Awning

Sunday, our first full day in Melbourne was pretty uneventful, we went over to the family's RSL club they go to and had a few frames of snooker and also had a fantastic roast dinner cooked by Hazel (steve's cousin)

On Monday we started the job search, it didn't get too far unfortunately but we got a couple of leads, and also found a nice pub with pool and showing a repeat of the Man U - Arsenal game from the previous day. That evening we hit the city and headed to the Crown (a massive casino complex) where got a few beers and watched the Nadal - Murray tennis match from the Australian Open (Murray lost). A few Jaegerbombs (Jaegermeister http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A4germeister and Red Bull) later we headed upstairs to the nightclub Odeon, no idea really how that was, but we did manage to jump the taxi queue and get driven home by a Kenyan.

During the day on Tuesday we went down a nearby park with Michael (Hazel's 21yo son, who also lives here) played a bit of cricket, and aussie rules football, I wore my Collingwood vest Michael (also a poud Magpies fan) lent me and got

Andrew texting

Andrew texting in the Caravan

my upper arms sunburnt. That night we had tickets to the quarter finals of the Australian Open tennis and after an good Indian we headed to the city for the games. Our tickets were for the show court, The Rod Laver Arena a really impressive stadium holding about 15,000 tennis fans with a retractable roof which was partly closed for this evening session, it was certainly really cool watching tennis under floodlights, Wimbledon eat your heart out. Along with the tennis this stadium also holds concerts (not just Cliff!) and will be hosting the FINA World Swimming Championships in March. We saw two matches, first up was the eventual winner Federer against Robredo (3-0 Federer) and then some woman's doubles match which wasn't that exciting and can't remember the score.

After the late night previously, we were quite tired and headed home after the tennis. The next day we were back in the Rod Laver arena for some more quarter final action from the women. Particularly the lovely Sharapova and Hingis, no idea of the scores but plenty of grunting and screaming! The last match on was an epic, Davydenko, a russian, versus Haas, a german. This went all

Rod Laver Arena

The massive tennis arena before the action started

the way to 5 sets ending in a victory for Haas and lasting around 3 and a half hours. After the tennis we made the 10min walk into the city centre where we had a couple of beers and a really nice italian meal before heading back to the van.

On Thursday, we stepped up our house searching finding a city estate agent who couldn't really help us and just directed us to the Internet, back to square one, while we were in the city we thought we might as well have a couple of drinks in the area. One place we found was doing a free bbq which was a right touch, it was while we were in there and as the place was getting ever so much busier that we realised that today was Australia Day Eve (Australia Day - big public holiday) so with no one working the next day Melbourne would be partying. We therefore headed back home jumped in the shower and got ready for a big night.

We ate that night in a pub at Melbourne Central station where a live band were playing all modern hits which was good fun, but

Tommy Robredo

Federers opponent coming into the arena

we weren't entirely happy. When we were in Melbourne previously we had read about an alternative music place with live bands called Bootleg and this was what we wanted that night. A previous search for it had ended in meeting Taz and going into a pub with escalators, will this time be different? I'll stop all this Dan Brown bullshit and just tell you, yes, we did and and paid the $22 cover charge (almost a tenner) to get in, we were too late for the first couple of bands but had made it in time for the headliners a band called Youth Group. They were alright a bit middle of the road rock and neither me nor shel were overly impressed, we later find out that they've had an aussie number one and a song featured in The OC, they're huge!

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