Melbourne - Part One

This past weekend I went to Melbourne, Australia's second largest city, located in Victoria. Charity and I did SO much in the two and a half days we were there, that I have decided to write two blog posts so that I can cover everything!

So, on Wednesday night I received a voicemail from JetStar (the airline we were flying) that just said to call them back as soon as possible. I tried to call them back for 2 and a half hours with no luck... Charity finally got ahold of someone at like 1am and found out that our 1:05pm flight on Friday was canceled. We had to move to the 7am flight... I guess it was nice in the end because we had a lot more time in Melbourne, but waking up at 4:45am was not fun!

Things went smoothly in the airport and plane ride- the security here is more relaxed, especially for a domestic flight. I didn't have to show a boarding pass or even my passport! We arrived at Avalon airport, only to find out that it was a VERY tiny airport (it is basically JetStar's own airport)... we actually walked out of the plane on steps, which I had never done before! From the airport we had to take a 50 minute bus ride into the city.

Much of Friday was spent exploring the city. We walked along the Yarra River and took pictures with some of the buildings along the river. The Crown hotel and casino is located on the Yarra River- it cost $1 billion to make and is the largest casino in Australia. I did not get the chance to go, which is probably for the best! :)

Our next stop was Federation Square. It is sort of like the center of town - very busy and full of people! I saw a lot of Federation Square including St. Paul's Cathedral, Flinders Street Station, and the Ian Potter Center (National Gallery of Victoria - free art museum). From there, we walked through the botanic gardens area- including the Alexandra Gardens, the Queen Victoria Gardens, and finally the Royal Botanic Gardens. Along the way we stopped at the Shrine of Remembrance - a huge World War I memorial. There was a balcony that overlooked the city with pretty views of the skyline.

The cool thing about Melbourne is their cafe culture. There are a ton of outdoor cafes- the catch is that they are all located in these tiny alleys off of the main roads! So on the surface the main roads look pretty typical- full of fast food restaurants and souvenir shops. But, once you start to find all of these hidden alleys you discover that there is a whole other part of the city! So we ate at a little cafe and had some pizza and people watched, it was fun! After lunch we grabbed some desert at another cafe, and walked through Chinatown. Chinatown was slightly disappointing because there were no fun shops, just restaurants- but, it was still nice to see.

After Chinatown we headed to our hostel- Nomads Industry. We stayed in a ten bed mixed sex room. It had 5 bunk beds and not much else. I was really anxious about it at first, but it turned out to be fine. It was pretty clean and we really didn't see or talk to our other roommates because we were barely in the actual room! We lucked out and had no problems.

We relaxed for a while, and then headed to Lygon St., Mebourne's Little Italy area. It was nice, basically a ton of cafes. There was a small park called Argyle Square, and a giant solar clock called the Piazza Italia. It was a nice area. We ate a big Italian meal in a little cafe outside, and the food was good! Since we were so full we deicded to check out the University of Melbourne's campus, where we wandered around for a while. It was a nice campus, but I like the University of Sydney better :) We went back to Little Italy for some gelato, because gelato is a must in Little Italy!

So that was just our first day! We got to see the majority of the city, and had a lot of fun exploring!

Here are pictures I posted from the first day (and a couple from day 2):
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2061795&id=15508583&l=4538682198

Enjoy!

Love,
Becky