Melbourne

Melbourne is awesome. It is definitely the best city I have visited in Australia, there are heaps of things to do and it has a really good feel to it. It is the arts/cultural capital of the country, and it shows. There are so many different kinds of people there, and just walking down the street you can see skater kids, business people, hipsters, and everyone else of any race you can think of (I even met a guy from Sudan). Our visit also coincided with World Youth Day, which is this giant Catholic gathering of 'pilgrims' from all over the globe. The city they meet in this year is Sydney, so they were touring around the country beforehand I guess. You would see people walking down the street wearing flags from their respective countries or other paraphernalia. Our hostel was at full capacity with these people and other backpackers too. Anyways, the city was really neat, there are all these different sections to it, and I'm pretty sure I covered most all of it by walking around in a different direction each day. There were a ton of laneways and arcades that were cool to explore. One time I walked into an arcade and it popped out into this alley that was filled with cafes on each side with graffiti on the brick walls and a guy was playing the violin in a corner... I felt like I had landed in some sortof Harry Potter other universe, the place just felt so different from where I walked out of. I had a sortof double take, and had to just take a moment to look around. There is a ton of street art there, and I took very many photos of the graffiti that I found all around the city. There were a lot of stencils around Brunswick Street, and the rest were more elaborate creations of crazy images that I saw around Victoria street or just in random places. It doesn't seem to be minded that much, at least it seems that they don't try to cover it up constantly because it's everywhere.

We did quite a few things in the city. We went on a tour of the old Melbourne Gaol (Jail, its spelled differently for some reason). It was used until 1994, which seems pretty recent because it looks very ancient. It reminded me of Alcatraz. It is the jail where Ned Kelly, the famous Australian outlaw, was hanged after he was finally caught. The facility housed women as well, and even some of their kids if they were too young to be left by themselves. It seemed like a bad place to end up, but most jails are like that I would assume. We also went to an AFL game! (a.k.a. Australian Rules Football, or footy). We were really confused in the beginning as to what the hell was going on, but we figured it out mostly by the end. It was at the MCG, which is a really famous stadium. They play on a gigantic oval field, which was cool, different from what I'm used to with the rectangular playing fields for soccer or football or anything else. One of the most fun nights was when we went on the 'hidden bars of Melbourne' tour. These bars really were hidden. Most of them consisted of a door in a random alleyway that opened to stairs, and when you went up them you found these little bars with different crazy themes. The best one by far was the ice bar. It was awesome. Everything was made of ice (walls, statues, chairs, the cups...), and you get a snow jacket, gloves, and booties when you go inside. It's really cold in the place, so you don't stick around too long, but it was really neat to be there for awhile. They had really good drinks too, and for some reason messed up and gave me 2 drink cards instead of one, so I felt lucky. The other bars we went to were Seamstress (used to be a sweat shop? It had oriental style fabrics hanging all around), Cabinet (really good drink there - it was warm and lemony with honey and cloves in it, it was like alcoholic tea), Eurotrash, and a couple others. We were in a big group of other random people, and it was cool to hang out with them.

Our hostel was freakin amazing. Definitely the best hostel I have ever stayed in. It was super clean, all the rooms had only 4 people in them at most, some even had their own bathrooms, there were a lot of cool hangout areas and plasma TVs everywhere, and they had a huge bar and really nice kitchen facilities (free breakfast and pasta/rice too!). The people there were awesome as well, easy to make friends with and they all wanted to hang out and have a good time. It was a bit of a walk out to the rest of the city, but I didn't mind it, it was definitely worth it to stay at this place. OH and every day at lunch we had sushi. That was another awesome part of Melbourne, there are sushi stands on every street pretty much, and it's just about the cheapest food you can find, so perfect match for our trip. It's about $2 per roll (its just the rolled up sushi, they don't cut it up), so thats a good deal I'd say, you get a couple of those and you're set. I would definitely be buying that all the time back in Brisbane if I didn't have a meal plan. Anyways, this whole trip over my winter break was lots of good times, I really had fun traveling around with Shannon and exploring new places around the country. It was cold at times, but not as bad as I thought it would be, and we got to do a ton of awesome stuff, i give it two thumbs up! Woo!


Photos are: city during the day/night, hanging out in a park, Shannon and I at the ice bar, me wearing Ned Kelly's 'armor' that he had to not get bullet wounds, Shannon and I at the AFL game, and some of the graffiti around the city