Melbourne!

Photos!

On Saturday morning, I packed all my things, and then Katherine, Kyle, and I caught a taxi to the airport for our flight. The dryer broke when Kyle tried to dry his clothes, so his baggage was way overweight, causing him to jettison some course readers at the airport and repack his bags in line, and he made me carry his "stupid monkey puppet" for him. Why he had a monkey puppet in his bag, to this day I don't know. Our arrival in Melbourne was a little rough at first. After Kyle departed (he was staying with a friend in a suburb), Katherine and I fought waves of people heading in the opposite direction to a U2 concert to drag all our luggage to the tram stop (most of Melbourne's public transit is by tram). Then we watched in confusion as several trams of the type we wanted drove past us on a street that was not on their route. Finally a transportation officer came and explained to us (and everyone else at the stop) that our tram route had been changed due to "people standing in the street down by Parliament House" (that's a direct quote). Things went smoother after that as we checked into our hostel, ate some dinner, and relaxed. Our hostel was in St. Kilda, a former red light district, now home to hordes of hip twentysomethings and seven cake shops in a three block area.

The next day got off to another rocky start. First we filled the entire communal kitchen with smoke trying to cook some bacon for breakfast. Then the train Kyle had to take into the city was partly closed for maintenance or something, so he was hours late. Once he arrived, we wandered along the St. Kilda beach and out onto the pier, then took a tram into downtown Melbourne. We walked to Federation Square, a well-known square with a lot of really bizarre architecture that serves as a center of activity. It was Polish Day apparently, so we got to see Polish musicians playing and lots of stalls selling birthstones and vodka. After that we visited the Melbourne Museum, whose claim to fame is the preserved body of Phar Lap, Australia's favorite racehorse. Phar Lap won tons of races in his time, became a national icon, and then died under mysterious circumstances in America. Now he's stuffed and on display in the Melbourne Museum. After that, we visited a lot of souvenir shops, took some trains around downtown, saw some landmarks, and walked through Melbourne Central shopping mall, which reminded me a lot of the Mall of America, except that instead of an amusement park they have an old shot tower under a massive glass dome.

One note on Melbourne traffic: I swear the preferred method of crossing the street is to stand on the curb for a few seconds, then dart out randomly and pray that you don't get hit. Some intersections don't even provide pedestrian crosswalks or traffic lights, seemingly assuming that there's no need for them since everyone will be utilizing the dart method anyways.

On Monday Kyle wasn't making the trip into the city, so Katherine and I set off on our own to the Bayside area, some suburbs south (I think) of the city. We wandered through a nice little shopping district, ate some focaccia sandwiches, and aimed for the beach. As soon as we got there, the weather, which had been beastly hot (36 degrees C) and relentlessly sunny until that point, suddenly clouded over and got cold. We were'nt all that surprised, as this only continued a long streak of malicious weather determined to prevent us from swimming. For the last month of school, every weekday would be hot and sunny, but as soon as the weekend arrived when we were able to go to the beach, the temperatures would drop, only to rise again the next week. So I half-expected exactly what happened here. We still laid around on the beach and tried to swim briefly, and tried to figure out what exactly the bathing boxes were used for. That evening we ate way too much pasta and watched Billy Elliot in the lounge.

The next day, we packed up our stuff and dragged it to the Melbourne Central train station (after first eating some delicious cake from one of the St Kilda shops). We had a whole day before our train left, so we first visited the Old Melbourne Gaol (gaol is just a bizarre way of spelling jail), most famous as the place where the infamous Ned Kelly was imprisoned and ultimately hanged. If you aren't familiar with the Ned Kelly story, he was an outlaw who carried off a series of daring holdups, culminating in a firefight where he appeared in heavy metal armor that made him impervious to the police officers' bullets. Unfortunately, his armor didn't cover his legs, so the police shot them out, captured him, and later hanged him. Now he's basically a folk hero. Australians love him, and there's all sorts of theories about how he may not have been all that bad of a guy (for example, he may have been falsely accused of the intial crime which forced him to go on the run). Besides lots of information on Kelly, the gaol had exhibits about other prisoners, death masks (plaster casts of hanged criminals' heads taken for phrenology), and grisly details about death by hanging that tour guides were happily relating to groups of small schoolchildren while we were there. Really, Australians have some very strange ideas about what's appropriate for kids.

After the gaol, we creepily ran into Kyle crossing a street, so we walked down to the Shrine of Remembrance with him - Melbourne's World War memorials. After visiting a few more souvenir shops so Katherine could buy a stuffed wombat, we took a train that was supposed to get us back to Melbourne Central to catch our train to Sydney. A series of extremely unlucky events led to us not disembarking at Central, finding out that all the trains were only going in one direction, meaning we couldn't return to Central from the stop after it, taking a tram across the city, and then running into the train station shouting not to leave yet, at which point the conductor yelled at us, "We're not even boarding yet, calm down!" Turns out there had been some delays, so then we stood on the platform for a while before we could get on the train which was taking us overnight to Sydney.