Monday, December 18, 2006

Victoria - Melbourne: 1st Day

Early start for us this morning as we have a 7.30am flight so 5am wakeup :( Marc was obviously not happy about it as he was still suffering…

When leaving Brisbane we got asked by the security what the aerosol can was in our hand luggage – this turned out to be our spray cooking oil! Oops, but the lady was nice enough and let us through... however the "drugs" police stopped us shortly after and did some tests on our luggage & discovered the spray oil :( this guy was not happy & said that if held to a flame it will create a blow torch effect - like we even had a lighter on us! & what about the deo we were carrying? He then asked us which security check we went through, so hopefully the lady didn't get too much of a bollocking. The funny thing was when we later discovered that we actually had Marc's leatherman in our hand luggage too! Surprised they didn't spot that!

We checked into Hotel BakPak (now this was a huge place with 5 floors and a roof terrace) and were quite happy with the room which was clean, though walls were paper thin. After checking out the roof, we went for a walk around town. Melbourne was much bigger that we originally thought but at least it was much cooler here than Bris.

We walked down to the Fitzroy Gardens and saw Captain Cook’s cottage that they shipped over from England and rebuilt. We also had a wander around the Chinese garden before stopping off at the tea garden for a breather and looked at the mini-village that they had there – it’s a replica of Tudor village in Lambeth (our borough in London). There was also a fairy tree, where a children’s book author carved fairies and gnomes into a dead tree stump. This was pretty cool and also painted. Typical us though - we had our tea, then spent about 10 minutes searching for the fairy tree, which turned out to be right next to the cafe ;)


We then headed on past some churches and the beautiful St Patricks Cathedral, before reaching Brunswick Str. This street is well known for its weird & wonderful shops selling allsorts. We soon found a shop that we both liked and wondered round it for a while. They had some really amazing photo albums, but at A$250 it was a bit steep! As we were about to leave the shop Ev spotted some cool ink pens made of glass with a bottle of Indian black ink. When Ev picked it up to have a closer look at the design of the pen, and the ink bottle rolled out of the box and smashed on the floor!! Oops, this was a bit silly of Ev and she told the guy at the counter who hurried to clean it up. Luckily we weren’t charged the absurd amount for it – we did think it was a bit silly having the ink loose in the box with nothing keeping it in place.


We then walked along Lygon Street (known for over 144 Italian restaurants). As it was a little too early for dinner we headed to the library for some blogging. We ended up having dinner in Chinatown. It seems there is a road for every culture, as there is a “quarter” or road for the Arabs, Greeks, Chinese, Italian…

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