Melbourne, Australia

Where the heck are we? Four hours prior to landing in Melbourne Lara and I were on the beach in sunny 90' weather. When we got off the bus in Melbourne it was 60' and lightly raining. WTF?

As mentioned above, the weather in Melbourne wasn't the best when we started our first day. Overcast, slight drizzle, and kind of cold. We had always heard comparisons of Melbourne to San Francisco, this was more like Seattle. Since the weather wasn't cooperating for us to hit the town we headed out to one of Melbourne's many museums, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, aka a museum for Australia's movie history. You quickly realize the many contributions Australia has made to cinema, such as; Mad Max, Crocodile Dundee P. 2 - Mick's Revenge, and lots of material for making fun of Australians. One interesting fact, until the 1970's only Melbourne and Sydney had television and to this day Australia still does live commercials similar to the ones the US did in the 1950's.

After our museum trip Lara and I decided to have lunch at a normal restaurant. Up to this point we had kind of noticed that Australian portions of food were a little on the large side, but we hadn't thought much of it. At this particular restaurant (a non-chain restaurant similar to Chili's) I ordered a kangaroo burger and Lara ordered chicken parma. As you can tell from the picture, the portions at this particular restaurant were massive. We asked our server if she would expect a chicken parma to be as large in America as the one she gave us in Melbourne. Her reply, "I reckon so, but with less salad." This response as well as many similar ones gave us the impression that Australians think Americans are all fat and do nothing but watch the Simpsons and eat Super-sized Big Macs. Whatever. We go to Burger King too.

The following day the skies cleared and the two of us headed out to St. Kilda. St. Kilda is a beach neighborhood in Melbourne about 7 kilometers from the city center. We realized in Sydney that cities in Australia are really small and you can walk everywhere. For some reason the locals thought we were crazy for walking to St. Kilda since it was 2 miles away. But then again, Australians are almost as fat as Americans.

We walked around St. Kilda most the day and had a great time. St. Kilda is on the water and has a cool pier, boardwalk, beach, small amusement park, and neat downtown. On the pier we saw an endangered penguin and a bunch of jelly fish. We had a nice drink and some oysters on the boardwalk. And in the downtown we stopped in a few shops and got some rare records at Rare Records.

From St. Kilda we took Melbourne's overpriced tram to its botanical gardens. I'm not a big botanical gardens guy, but after walking through Melbourne's I could be. The gardens were huge (or maybe felt huge because we got lost) and were like walking through a very well kept rainforest. Since it was late in the day and near closing time Lara and I were the only ones around for most of our walk. We exited the botanical gardens into one of Melbourne's many great parks and the park was totally packed. Lara and I have been living in San Francisco for 5 years and have seen tons of marathon training sessions and packed San Francisco parks filled with yuppies like us. But Melbourne has this to a whole new level. Corporate fun runs filled with white collar 20 and 30-somethings. Boot camps. 35 year olds jogging with their young kids biking. Was this Melbourne or San Francisco's Fort Mason? On the way back to our hotel we walked along the river and were stopped by a group having a party in one of the riverside crew houses. The group was having their Chrissy Party (Australians shorten everything. Christmas is known as Chrissy) in a building along the river and invited us up to help finish off their leftover alcohol. We were more than happy to help and we made some friends in the process.

That night we hung out with some guys that we met the night before. Two of the guys are from the US and one was from Canada. The five of us bar hopped around one of Melbourne's many cool neighborhoods. As we were walking from one bar to the another we saw a car drive by and some people yelling from it. Then all of a sudden we heard a POP. We had a man down and I was hit too. It was a drive-by egging! One of the guys in our group took an egg to the neck and I got some of the ricochet. Luckily, a welt and some yoke was all that we ended up with.

In our third full day in Melbourne the two of us hit up Melbourne's Queen Victoria Market. The market was fantastic. Australia was the most expensive country we have visited and we hadn't been buying much because of it. The stuff at the market was cool and actually inexpensive. We loaded up on Chrissy presies (Christmas presents) for the family and had a great experience. Again, all the people we met were incredibly friendly and helpful. We finished the day by walking around another of Melbourne's great parks and spent the night hanging out with our new friends hopping around more bars.

We had a flight to the Whitsundays early the next morning. That night we had a dilemma, move to Melbourne or Sydney?