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Published: June 27th 2010
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From Tasmania i returned to Kate's halls to collect my bag and head into Melbourne to do some sightseeing around the city. Its a really nice city with a few skyscrapers and a big grid design that makes it easy to navigate. Its home to a number of stadia for cricket, rugby league and Aussie Rules Football (AFL) which i'll talk about later. The Yarra river runs through it alongside the botanical gardens.
I stayed at a YHA in the centre of town, its a pretty new place, so its clean and full of nice people. Across the road from my hostel was the Melbourne Aquarium where they have a large display of penguins in an antartic style enclosure, they were sliding on their bellies across the ice and swimming around quite contently. The aquarium had a large shark and giant Ray tank where scuba divers hand fed them, the sharks were very disinterested though!
Another interesting exhibition was the display of Captain Scott's belongings and stories of how, from 1901- 1904, he travelled from Australia to be the first man to explore Antartica extensively by land. He only took with him a group of men, dogs and supplies in
sledges, many suffered from frostbite, snow blindness and scurvy.
From the aquarium I crossed the Yarra river to the south bank where, standing just shy of 1,000 feet is the Eureka Skydeck, the southern hemisphere's highest viewing platform with amazing views of Melbourne and Victoria. The pictures should describe it better than i can.
If you cast your minds back to when i was in San Francisco i met an Aussie named Tim who is from Melbourne. I got in contact with him and that evening we met up for a few beers. He is back at university and unfortunately i have come at a time when he is busy with assignments so we cannot hang out too much. We meet up that evening in a cool bar called Sector 8 down a side alley (not meant to sound dodgy!) its an open plan place with shipping crates as furniture and graffiti and other funky art designs as decoration. Tim introduces me to some Victoria beers, of which there are many. Creatures, Coopers and Pure Blonde; Victoria Bitter is the most famous beer in the region, and throughout a lot of Australia, but i don't rate it.
Tim
and I chatted for ages about what we had both been up to since we had seen each other, he travelled around a lot of the US for four months. Tim had to get back to his studies so we agreed to meet up next week when he would be less busy with work.
Back at the hostel I met some cool people from Northern Ireland (despite them being Liverpool fans) but there was a guy in my room who has to be the laziest man in the world. I was in a four bed shared room and the bloke in the bunk below me was constantly in bed. That day i woke up at 9am and he was still in bed, fair doos. I went for brekkie and a wander and returned at 11am, still in bed, ok maybe he had a late night. I go to the aquarium and walk around the city and return at 3pm, still in bed. I go for another walk and then meet up with Tim in the evening, i come back at 10pm and he's STILL in bed, not cool, plus it means the room stinks. Its really annoying going into
your room in the late afternoon and worrying about being quiet for someone lazy. This continued for three days...
The following day I decided to go to a courier service to ask about sending a parcel home. When i was in Fiji i bought a mahogany Kava bowl as well as souvenirs and gifts for family, this was starting to weigh me down so i boxed it up and sent it home. The guy behind the desk was a really nice friendly guy, asking me about the places i'd been and where i was from. I asked him a lot about Aussie Rules football too as i found it fascinating, i really wanted to go see a game.
Now with a considerably lighter load i returned to the hostel to pick up more leaflets and see what else Melbourne had to offer. Only a short walk down the road was the Immigration Museum, i got in for free and found it really interesting. It's all about how Australia went from being a place for Aboriginals and convicts to promoting immigration and building it into the country it is today. Since 1945 some 7 million people have migrated to
Australia for reasons of finding better opportunites, escaping famine and war or simply starting over. Many of the immigrants came from England, Ireland and Asia.
Today Australia has a population of around 20 million and only 2.7% are indiginous aboriginals; meaning immigration has had a huge impact.
For the rest of the day i felt i really needed to update my blog as many of you were complanining of my slacking, i always enjoy writing them its just sitting down and starting thats the problem. When i uploaded my two New Zealand blogs i had a look at who was perfroming at the Melbourne Comedy Festival i had seen advertised around town. I found Tim Vine was playing the following evening and being a massive fan i booked it and went along. It was hilarious, lots of silly Tommy Cooper style, one-liners and gags with props. He's a middle class guy from South London so it brought back some thoughts of home too.
I forgot to mention that the week before, Kate and I had organised to go visit Alice Springs and the Red Centre of Australia. Kate booked us a camper van and we caught our flight
at 4am to Alice Springs.
Im gonna leave this blog brief because i have more news from Melbourne later on. In the small trips Kate and I made together we always used Melbourne as a base so theres more to come, stay tuned!
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