First days in Melbourne

Here it is Sunday already meaning that we’ve been in Melbourne for nearly five days.  We left Auckland at 8:00 in the morning and were in Melbourne by 8:30 am.  It’s 2 hours earlier here than in Auckland. Going through customs was pretty smooth.  I of course declared that I had been on a farm/in wilderness areas within the last 30 days, so that meant one extra line, but the officer just asked was I declaring my hiking shoes and were they clean to which I answered yes and we were waved through.

View from our apartment one morning

You know you're close to home when you see the pink elephants

We got a taxi into town.  There is an airport bus to downtown, but then we would have had to figure out the tram system right away or catch a taxi in downtown out to our apartment.  We are staying at the edge of St. Kilda southeast of the central business district.  The one-way street the apartment was on was a little tough for the taxi driver to find, but he made a u-turn and then backed up to our street.  We are sharing the apartment with our friends Tom and Leah from Albuquerque and their taxi driver missed the street altogether and let them off at the far end of the one way street.  The apartment is very modern with cement floors and very high ceilings in the open living room/kitchen/dining area.  It opens onto a nice patio with lots of potted plants.  The second floor has a large bathroom and one bedroom and the third floor has a second bedroom with a balcony.  There is a shared pool that is about 5 feet wide and 30 feet long running the length of the building suspended over the patio.  It is shared with the neighboring apartment. 

Our landlady was still cleaning the apartment when we arrived, so we left our luggage and headed over the large leafy St. Kilda Street for lunch.  St. Kilda runs from where we live straight to the central business district.  It is lined with large apartment and office buildings and occasional cafes and restaurants.  Trams run down the middle of the street and sycamores shade the edges and center of the 4 lane road. On our side of St. Kilda is an older neighborhood of one and two story Victorian cottages and new one and two story small very modern houses where presumably there used to be a cottage.

We settled in to the apartment in the afternoon and walked up St. Kilda Rd. to an Italian Café called Rosco’s that Tom and Leah were familiar with.  They make good pastas and salads and decent pizzas. From there we took a walk to our closest grocery store down Fitzroy Road maybe a half mile away. We passed through a park where white and yellow cockatiels were yelling from the trees.  The grocery is called Woolworths, but it bears no relation to the Woolworth’s five and dimes of the US.

Cake store on Ackland St.

On Wednesday Jake and I took a walk down to the beach in St. Kilda on Port Philip Bay.  There is a long pier you can walk out onto with a café at the end.  I enjoyed an ice coffee pretending surprise that the Australians also make iced coffee with ice cream!  Of course later we walked down Acland St. with its multitude of cake stores and regretted we weren’t hungry. 

View from the St. Kilda pier looking towards downtown

One plot at the community garden, St. Kilda

Community garden, St. Kilda

St. Kilda is perhaps a little past its glory days, but has lots of non-chain retail shops and casual restaurants to make it interesting.  There is a lovely big community garden showing off the artistic and horticultural prowess of its participants.  There is also a big amusement park called Luna Park with an old-fashioned wooden roller coaster.  The beach was well populated with sunbathers of all ages despite it being the middle of the week and despite the Australian government’s many warnings about skin cancer.  All the school uniforms for little kids include cute little hats!

Our closes large market is the Prahan Market, a big Victorian building housing a huge number of fruit and vegetable, meat and deli stalls.   We wandered around looking at everything then had to sit down with some coffee and a smoothie and a pastry to think about what we wanted to buy for lunch and dinner.  We sat by a children’s activity corner where dozens of kids with their parents and grandparents listened to a man dressed in a mariachi outfit play guitar and sing familiar children’s songs mostly in English.  He did do De Colores partly in Spanish.  A face painter was doing an amazing job matching themes and colors to whatever the kids were wearing – a pink and white flower to go with a little girl’s flowered dress and a tiger face for a boy dressed in orange and black.

Deli area of the Prahan Market

We decided on prosciutto and melon for lunch and assorted dips with baguettes, a corn salad, and chicken thighs for dinner.  This required shopping at 5 different stalls.  We have all kinds of ideas for future dinners including “tastes of Australia” with kangaroo, wallaby and barramundi featured.

The other big market is the Victoria Market downtown.  We have of course already visited that one too.  We had lunch at a Turkish stall selling gozlemes, the Turkish equivalent of a quesadilla with feta and in this case pumpkin and spinach, served with a yogurt dip.  That market is a little louder and larger with a huge area of people selling clothing, shoes, souvenirs, tablecloths, etc. 

Flower of the Firewheel Tree, Stenocarpus sinuatus

One feature of the Children's Garden at the Royal Garden

Jake has joined a gym a few blocks away that is located in a former church on Chapel Street.  I have visited a portion of the Royal Botanical Garden.

Royal Botanical Garden

We have made several trips into the Central Business District, but some of those details I’ll leave to other posts.  In general it is very busy with lots of shops and restaurants. You end up going through it to get to other neighborhoods frequently using the tram system. There is a small Chinatown area with lots of restaurants but few shops.  It has some beautiful Victorian era arcades that run between streets.  We did take the historic #35 tram around town and it has a running narrative most of the time on touristic sites.  It said there were lots of Spanish restaurants on one street, so we decided to venture over to that neighborhood, Fitzroy, for dinner one night.  We found few Spanish restaurants, but we ate outside at The Fitz on a corner of Smith St., a street lined with restaurants and boutiques and a youngish crowd.  We shared to appetizers and a pasta.  The appetizers were crostini with fresh tomatos and basil, and smoked duck breast slices on lettuce leaves. The pasta was duck with a nice sauce and very fresh noodles.  I got a gin and tonic and Jake had a very good cloudy apple juice.  

For dessert we ended up at N2 Extreme Gelato.  This was an experience and I'm sorry I didn't have my camera with me.  They make individual servings of gelato as you order them using liquid nitrogen.  The menu is fairly limited but creative.  I got the Brokeback, vanilla gelato with pieces of honey crisp served with a hard chocolate coating and a syringe of salted caramel.  So the staff pour cream into the bowl of an electric mixer, put on their goggles, and then pour in liquid nitrogen.  The fog pours out of the bowl as the mixer spins your serving of gelato.  They’ve got about 5 mixers all going at once.  I know, ridiculous!  But it was very good, very smooth gelato.  Other flavors included the dirty banana split with cocoa nibs and banana gelato, rum raisin, and cosmopolitan.  They have a very funny script on the wall about the whole concept and process.  Just down from this place is an ice bar where people were putting on their parkas before passing through the freezer door to the bar.  Apparently this is the latest bar trend. I don't like cold enough to try it.

The other neighborhood we have briefly visited is Carlton, near Melbourne University, renowned for its Italian restaurants.  We went there to see a movie with Tom and Leah and two of their friends and then dined at University Café (which is Italian).  Carlton is more upscale with broader, leafier streets and higher end boutiques than Fitzroy.  University Café was very good.  We got pasta amatriciana, nice and spicy, and a Caesar salad that came with a poached egg on top and pieces of bacon.