Righto, so after a whirlwind 4 days of class after getting back from Cairns, I grabbed my things after class on Thursday and walked to catch my train to the airport. I was headed to Melbourne, which is to the south, in Victoria. I was sick, and it was no fun flying congested :(. By the time my plane landed it was pretty late. I took a shuttle to Southern Cross Station, but the free bus that normally would have taken me to my hostel wasn't running anymore, so I grabbed a taxi rather than wandering around by myself at 11pm. Ashley had gone the day before, so I met her at the hostel and managed to get put in her room for the night, where we hit the sack pretty quickly.
The next morning we didn't have to meet our group until 3pm, but me and Ashley grabbed breakfast and went to check out the aquarium. When we got there we realized there was a shark and fish feeding, so we weedled our way down to the very end area to watch it - where we were greeted by a couple divers with the MASSIVE stingrays. After watching them feed the sharks, we spent the next hour or so trying to make our way through the aquarium backwards, which proved to be impossible in the end (we had to go out and back in the front). We had incentive to get back to the beginning though because they had Australia's only Antarctic penguins :D.
After the aquarium we went to check into our new room since we were staying with Study Australia and meet up with them. Surprisingly there was only about 20 people on our trip - normally there is more like 50 I think, but that made it nice that we weren't a massive group. That day started out with a tour around the city. Melboune is a really cool super artsy place. It's a big city but it's not clausterphobic like a lot of other cities are. They also have tons of public transit, including a free tram and free tourist bus that makes a huge loop around the city. It has a huge shopping culture and has everything between super expensive boutiques to little cool shops and a massive market that we explored later in the weekend. Our tour lead us to this awesome little place called Mme Brussels which was set up like an old lady tea party on a terrace and all the waiters were dressed as pool boys. Lauren our tour guide ordered us some mocktails and we hung out until it was dinner time. Dinner was in chinatown at this restaurant with the best dumplings, it was so good. The only thing better was our dessert, which we went to a chocolate bar for. Also soooo good. We've decided chocolate bars definitely need to become a new trend in the US. Someone get on that :D.
After dessert we headed to our comedy show for the night. Melbourne has an annual comedy festival that lasts a number of weekends, and we caught the end of it. We saw Charlie Pickering, who was hilarious actually. I was kind of skeptical since the comedian we had seen during orientation at school was supposed to be really well-known, but I hadn't thought he was funny at all. But I was so glad we went to this show, definitely had us all belly-laughing more than once.
After the show a bunch of us headed for this science-themed bar we had been told about along the tour. There are a ton of really neat little bars and restaurants that are hidden away down smelly sketchy alleys. I definitely would have never gone by myself, or probably even with a couple people, but we had a fairly large group, and we all realllly wanted to go check out this science bar, called the Croft Institute. The ground floor was set up like a science lab, complete with bartenders dressed in labcoats. We couldn't resist getting some syringe shots either lol. The upstairs was set up like an old school gym, complete with risers on one side. Im glad we went- it was a lot of fun and a cool little place.
The next day was mostly free, and me and Ashley spent most of it in the Queen Victoria Markets that are these huge basically permanent markets right out back of our hostel. I bought a scarf for the aussie rules footy game we were going to that night, and we bought an apple while marveling at all the shouting going on in the produce section. DOLLA FOURTY BANAANA! lol. I briefly said hi to Jess from spring break who lives there and was doing some shopping there, but we were headed in the other direction so we didn't hang out for very long. We killed some more time by grabbing lunch and finding a gelato place that was really yummy. We did a lot of eating on this trip in case you haven't noticed. It's probably better I don't live there because they are all about the experiences- eating being right at the top. That's also why they have like 4 stadiums and tons of sports. That night we got to see one of them, as we went to see Collingwood vs. Hawthorne play in Aussie Rules Football (AFL). I actually really liked the game - it was pretty easy to understand and interesting to watch. We also creamed Hawthorne, so that was a plus too :).
The next morning we got up super early and met our bus for the day (yeah, another bus). We spent the day driving the Great Ocean Road, which has been voted one of the best drives in the world. Our first stop was Bells Beach, a famous surfing beach. It was kind of funny to me because I had just watched Breaking Point back in Cairns with Kazu when I was killing time after the trip, and it's based in Bells Beach. There's an annual surfing competition there that had just finished a few days before we got there, and there were still some stands up and stuff from it. The waves were massive as well, I can never get over how huge waves are here, but especially there.
We stopped for lunch at this sort of random place, but we walked up the road from there, and in someone's front yard was a wild koala! We found another one a little farther down the way as well- it was really cool to see them just chillin, outside of a zoo. There's just a bunch of koalas in the area apparently and they eat all the leaves off these poor particular eucalypts. Turned out the food was really good as well.
Other than a lookout point along the road, our only other stop we made was our main stop at the Twelve Apostles. We didn't really stop anywhere else, but just the drive itself was gorgeous, as it's right along the beach and mountains - a very windy road. The Twelve Apostles is basically huuuuge rocks shooting out of the sea. One would presume that there used to be twelve, but there isn't anymore since they are constantly being eroded by the sea. It was really pretty and we went to a number of different lookouts to see them. One of the things we did in the area was walk down to this beach area that had these cave-ish areas. It's hard to explain, but it was really pretty.
From there we headed back, which was quicker now that we weren't following the road along the ocean anymore, but it was still a few hours. We stopped by the airport to drop off the people who had flights out that night, and then we got dropped back off a the hostel. Me, Ashley, and Joey stayed that extra night since Monday morning flights had been less than half of the price of sunday night flights. It was nice because we just stayed in the same room as before and it was just the three of us. We went to bed early and got up before 5am Monday morning to begin the trek back to Wollongong. Thankfully I was feeling better and wasn't really congested anymore lol. I'm really glad I went- Melbourne was the last major place I really wanted to go in Australia before I left. If I had endless money and time I would go a million other places, but Melbourne and the Twelve Apostles made my majors list. Fun fun fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment