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Published: February 10th 2007
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Flemington Racecourse - me and Phar Lap post poison. This is a very brief rundown of my trip to Melbourne - but at least it finally updates the gaps in my blogs.
I arrived in Melbourne with Ursula in our little hire car. Actually it was a lot bigger than we had expected to hire - so we were very relieved to return it with no dents or bumps.
Melbourne is very confusing to drive around, so we returned the car the morning we arrived and spent our week in Melbourne walking. They do have public transport - but I could never actually work out which tram / bus was going which way, hence all my tours of Mellie were walking tours.
Whilst there I went to the Museum of Immigration, which was really interesting, the Crown Casino, the biggest casino in the Southern Hemisphere, which also turned out to be the biggest bore in the Southern Hemisphere. I will never understand pokies and have no desire to learn. There were no clocks, no windows, we walked only a few feet into the casino but still it took us ages to find our way out, and the whole place is more like an airport shopping mall -
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Maisie with Hung and Ali. just somewhere for very bored people to spend a lot of money. Fortunately we don't have a lot of money so we left quite quickly.
We shared a dorm with Branka from Sydney who drank like a fish and insisted we do likewise. It took a lot of arm twisting, but those of you who know me well will be surprised to hear that eventually I succumbed. The morning after is a lot easier when you don't have to get up and go to work - unless of course you get up and it is 42 degrees in the shade. Ursula and I spent the day crawling from one air-conditioned cafe to the next, eventually braving half a kilometre of heat to get to the cinema. Even the breeze was roasting. I was so glad that I was headed for NZ in a few days.
I went to visit with Hung, Maisie and Ali whom I met in Lennox Heads. It was lovely to catch up with them again, and I can never get over how eloquent Maisie is fora 2 year old. We had a great afternoon wandering around the park, going out for a Lebanese meal
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The Block Arcade, Melbourne (which was really lovely and I ate far too much). Ali showed me Flemington Racecourse - it looked very different from how it did on the tv during cup week, far less glamorous without the beautiful horses and overdressed punters.
I wandered around Victoria Markets, mooched around the town, and of course went for a night tour of Melbourne Gaol where Ned Kelly was hanged. It was a very macabre tour - they had a supposed former hangman as the guide, but if he was genuinely a hangman he carried out his last hanging at about the age of three. I couldn't bring myself to take photos, which is a bit pathetic now but at the time it seemed a bit sick to take photos of cells where people were cooped up in the most horrendous conditions and beams from which men were hanged.
One day whilst I was wandering around looking at my map trying to work out where I was a man stopped to help me and directed me to the place I was headed for. When I had finished wandering around that arcade, I bumped into him again. He asked me where I was headed
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Flinders Street Station, Melbourne next and said he was going there too. Then he asked me if I would like to go for a cup of coffee. I thought it wouldn't hurt to have a coffee with him - he seemed OK. I spent 23 of the next 25 minutes planning my escape. He seemed a bit overkeen on me, particularly considering he had known me for all of 2 minutes - he offered to pay for another flight to Auckland if I would delay my flight by a few days to spend time with him, he wanted us to go on holiday to Greece together - and was willing to pay for both our flights from Melbourne. I was trying to extricate myself from all these plans - on which I wasn't consulted at all, when he asked me my age and then said, as he was 2 years younger, "does it bother you dating someone who is younger". Generally the answer would be no, but when the person in question clearly doesn't realise you AREN'T dating them, well yes, it is quite a problem.
So that was my big romance in Australia - 25 minutes over tea with an escaped lunatic.
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The Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne Ursula and I went to St Kilda's beach to go on a dinner cruise and see the fairy penguins. But when we got there St Kilda's was truly uninspiring, the vessel didn't look sea worthy and the captain gave us the creeps. As we hadn't paid a deposit, we did a runner to the nearest supermarket and ate a take away on the roof terrace of our hostel, sharing wine and travel stories with the other backpackers.
There are some lovely shopping arcades in Melbourne, not that I could afford anything in them, but they are nice to wander round. And I spent an afternoon at the Melbourne Museum and Great Exhibition centre. I have always wanted to visit Melbourne, and although I wouldn't say it was a let down, it wasn't quite the pretty little city I have always imagined it to be. But it is definitely worth a visit, the night markets are good fun and of course I got to meet up with Hung and Ali again.
Next stop - Auckland.
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