Australia - Melbourne

My initial plan for Australia worked out somewhat like this: three or four days in Melbourne, three or four days in Sydney, try to meet some like-minded people and rent a car to drive up the coast. While I was still in New Zealand, that plan was scrapped. My friend and old college roommate, RJ, made a last-minute decision to come travel with me in Australia. I didn’t really expect this to happen so last minute, but given that he’s been wanting to go there for as long as I’ve know him, I wasn’t surprised. It just meant I had to adjust my plans a little bit. With this in mind, I planned to stay in Melbourne through Friday to catch an Aussie Rules game and meet RJ in Sydney on Saturday afternoon (St. Patrick’s day). It meant I had a lot of time to explore the city. So I did just that.

Walking would become a major theme during my stay in Melbourne and it all started on day one. I wandered all over the city, especially through the enormous botanical gardens and sports complex that cover the south side of downtown. I then stopped in the Gallery of Moving Images, which had a temporary exhibit on William Kentridge, a South African sketch artist, and a permanent exhibit on the history of cinema in Austrailia. I thought it was pretty cool. It was a public holiday and there was a carnival downtown, so I explored that as well. Melbourne was chock full of people enjoying the day off and, even though technically every day is a day off for me, I was one of them.

Through my travels I’ve met a number of Australians and always seem to get on well with them. Most of the one’s I’ve stayed in contact with have been Melbourners. Most recently it was Spencer and Adam while in Rio. Adam was still in Brazil, but Spencer was in town and we caught up over a drink

The next day involved more of the same: lots of walking and a couple of museums. I walked for a good hour to the Bill Fox classic car museum. Bill Fox is a trucking magnate from Australia whose car collection is probably only rivaled by Jay Leno. Unfortunately, most of his collection is scattered around the world in different museums and in private storage. There were only about 40 cars here. All really cool, but there’s so much more to his collection that I’d loved to have seen. I continued on to what I expected to be another museum in the afternoon, but was bummed to find the National Gallery was closed on Tuesdays.

But, it was open Wednesday. And that’s what I did in the morning. Once again I walked through the city and the gallery. It had an impressive collection of European and Asian paintings and artifacts from the past thousand years. It was the first true art gallery I’d made the effort to visit since I’d left. That afternoon I explored the beach community of St. Kilda, just south of downtown, with Spencer. The area has a very bohemian vibe, much like that of Venice beach. This is also the first and only time I took the trams. These things dominate the roads of Melbourne and are not only highly efficient (they cover nearly the entire city) but fairly inexpensive as well. But with such a highly concentrated downtown that’s easily accessible by foot, I didn’t really have much use for them.

The upcoming weekend saw the opening race of the Formula 1 season: The Australian Grand Prix. Held yearly in Melbourne. I spent nearly all day watching the first warm up day of this four-day event. The entire day consisted of time trials for V8 super cars and F4. I didn’t actually get to see the F1’s. But, for what it was, I enjoyed it. There was plenty to see around the paddock and pit road, including classic racecars, vintage car shows and plenty of hands on activities. By the end of they day I walked back and met another friend I’d met on the road, Jay. We went to a restaurant that specialized in chicken parmesan, which apparently is a standard Australian dish….because it’s not everywhere else? Then we went out to shoot a few games of pool with his friends.

And my last day was spent doing…absolutely nothing. I did a bunch of research into how Aussie Rules Football is played, only to realize at the last minute that the game was being played in Adelaide. Melbourne and Adelaide have stadiums with the exact same name. Naturally I got them confused.