Wednesday 16th February
The messed up sleep patterns that we have had mean that we have a slow start to the day. After an early breakfast we went back to bed for more rest. Then we walked to Liz's hotel and went up to her room. She is on the 19th floor, so has some fantastic views of the river, a park and, in the distance, there is the bay with boats at anchor. We learned that her husband Gary had changed his mind, as it was cold and snowing in England. He and their son Seoras would be coming out to the wedding after all. They would be arriving late tonight.
We went off to Federation Square which has several galleries and museums. The tourist information is there so we stocked up on information for the day and for the trip we are going to take after the wedding. We then went to an art gallery with an exhibition of aboriginal art. The building itself is a work of art as there are glass partitions giving odd views through the building and to the outside. We could have spent more time there but Harry (11 years and jet-lagged) was not enjoying things and so we went off for a coffee and hot chocolates. The coffee was about $3 and, with a $1 worth about 40p, I think that was a good deal. I am not sure of the price of a coffee in Covent Garden. The hot chocolate was served as a glass of hot frothed milk with a jug of liquid chocolate to be poured into it - delicious.
Even though we had been looking at aboriginal art, we had yet to see many aboriginal people in Melbourne. Perhaps that is because we are in the city centre. One thing that we have not seen is Big Issue sellers or the Australian equivalent. There are not the buskers who have a tin whistle and a dog. The buskers we did see though had a portable generator, mixing desk and CD's for sale. They were performing Andean music. I seem to remember having seen them in Norwich city centre a while back!
Melbourne has its central business district with the usual amount of high rise buildings. Out of that in the suburbs it seems to be a lot of single storey buildings, wide roads and plenty of space. There is a lot of Victorian and Edwardian architecture visible and it all seems in quite good condition.
After the drinks, Jenny and I went on a free circular tram ride from Flinders Street station. We saw the revamped docklands area. This is very similar to developments I have seen in London's South bank, Norwich and Bristol. When we got off the tram we were in the equivalent of Oxford Street with its tourist shops and "I love OZ" T shirts, hats with corks round it or crocodile teeth around the brim - I think not!
After that it was back to the hotel to pack and plan for the move to near Geelong. The plan is to collect the car, come back to the hotel to pick up the cases and leave Melbourne by the Geelong Road. The scary thing for me is that I will be driving in a different country, a new car which is automatic and I have never driven an automatic car before. Then in the CBD of Melbourne there are these curious junctions where, to get the trams through, to turn right you go into the left hand lane, wait until the straight ahead people have gone and the turn right across the front of the straight ahead lane and the trams. At the moment I am rather confused about it. Also when turning left you go forward a few feet and then stop as the pedestrians are crossing and they have right of way. I don't know how but it all seems to work, but I haven't been driving and messing things up!
In the evening we caught a tram out to the penultimate gas light market of the summer - but it is February and that does seem a little odd. The market is a covered Victorian market. In the evening it has art and craft stalls and food stalls with cuisine ranging from vegetarian to burger bars selling "Roo, Emu and Croc burgers". Even Harry doesn't fancy one of those! For pudding we had some Dutch pancakes. They were about an inch and a half round and about half an inch thick in the middle. Liz, who lived in Holland for a while, thought that they were the best pancakes she had tasted since leaving Holland and was thinking of emigrating just for the pancakes there and then. There was some good live music. It came from a trio playing didgeridoo, drum and laptop / keyboard. They seemed to be noodling around until the keyboard player pressed a key on the laptop and it all came together really well.
You may have thought that "G' Day" would be the phrase most heard but for us we heard "No worries" and "How can I help you" most often which is good. OK so you may not get a conversation going in a lift, especially first thing in the morning, but Melbourne is a friendly and chatty place.
We caught the tram back. They are really good. Ok so they would be expensive to put them back in this country but they are a good system. I have seen the system in Manchester and it seems to work really well there. When we came to look for photographs of Melbourne we found that we had left the camera in the hotel room and did not have any. We must have been busy enjoying ourselves!
