Our world tour Part 2

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Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Birthday of our youngest grandchild, Philip Ignacio. Happy birthday and may your future hold many interesting voyages.

Today was a typical "tourist day"; we bought a "hop on hop off ticket" giving us the flexibility to get on and off the bus at those places we wanted to visit. In theory that should work well, but in practice we only used one leg of the 13 stops the bus makes. Difficult to match the timing of your visits with the itinerary of the bus. Additionally the weather did not cooperate today. The rain showers and thunderstorms announced for yesterday, made their appearance today.

We made the most of our day, visiting the anglican St Paul Cathedral. Anglican churches can easily be confused with roman catholic ones. In broad lines they have the same outlay and follow many of the Roman Catholic rituals. What is different is that they do not have a pope and priests can be male or female and can get married. Visibly, a difference between the churches is the fact that Anglican churches do not have statues of saints, but strangely enough do have the same stainted glass windows with depictions of saints and episodes of Jesus life.

Following the Anglican cathedral we visited Cooks Cottage, Fitzroy Gardens, the Fairies' Tree and a model Tudor Village (a sort of small Madurodam).

In order to balance our visit to St Paul's Cathedral, we subsequently visited the Cathedral of St Patrick and the church of St Peter, all true roman catholic churches.....

Further on our tourist way we visited the Victoria's Parliament building and the main shopping streets of Melbourne, Collin's Avenue.

All these tourist attractions we did on foot, except the last stretch, that we did by tram. An interesting detail here, the usage of the tram in a certain centrical area of the city is free. There are new trams and very old ones, the latter reminding me of the "blauwe tram" (blue tram) when I was a boy in Voorburg. It is this old tram that goes in circles around the central part of town.

The fact that the tram is free facilitates the traffic in the central part of the city. Looks like a good initiative to me.

We finish the day with a great meal at a french bistro, Guillaume on the South Bank river walk.

As said, a typical day for tourism that left us with a great feeling about Melbourne.

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Photos

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Place for the children in St Paul. Good idea. Although maybe somewhat noisy.

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Cook's Cottage

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Model Tudor village

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Fairies' Tree

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St Peter church. Everyone has it's own place marked with a cushion with your armour.

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St Patrick

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Melbourne by night.