For our first morning in Melbourne, we’d signed up for a vegan food tour that Yanmei found on Airbnb. It was a warm sunny day. The other tour participants didn’t show up, so Yanmei and I basically got a private tour. What we didn’t realize was food and transportation wasn’t included. We ended up having to buy myki cards and put $10 on them, which basically gave us a day pass on the public transit. The good thing was we learned how to use the transit system as part of the tour.
Yanmei and our guide outside a vegan store. The problem with the tour was we were supposed to buy something in each store and we didn’t really want to, so we kind of stood around awkwardly then left each time. Eventually we finished at a restaurant called Lentil as Anything where we had lunch. It was pretty good. Yanmei had a Chai Latte, which she really enjoyed and wants to replicate when we get back to California.
After the tour when went back to our room for a rest. One interesting thing was while we were on the tram heading back some enforcement officers go on the tram. They use an honor system where you are supposed to swipe your myki card when you board. The enforcement officers were checking if we had swiped our cards. Of course Yanmei and I had, but two young women sitting behind us hadn’t. I was trying to eavesdrop on the conversation. First they started with excuses “I was in a rush and didn’t have time to reload my card”, then they tried to avoid the fine by claiming not to have any ID, the officer suggested their phones might have emails on them that could prove their names and addresses. I couldn’t really hear very well but after a long time they got written up for their fine. I looked it up, $238, ouch.
Later we decided to take the tram down to the beach and marina, since we basically had unlimited use anyway.
We headed out onto the pier for the sunset. It was pretty good. The best shot I got was actually when a drone flew overhead and I quickly tried to get a picture of it (spec in the top right).
We headed back as it got dark.
The next day we decided to walk to South Melbourne Market. The day was really hot, it got up into the mid-90s. Anyway Melbourne seems to love markets. It was fresh meat, fruit and veggies, as well as food stands, clothing shops and other miscellaneous stuff. Yanmei got some nice soaps.
Later I checked out the Shrine of Remembrance, which we could see from our apartment.
It is a World War One memorial. One of the best memorials I’ve seen. I like how the park surrounding it mutes some of the city noise.
For dinner we cooked yellow chicken curry with rice with the supplies we got from the market. After dinner we went to the Queen Victoria Night Market. Normally it is a day market, but Wednesday it converts to a night market with mostly food stands and live entertainment. It was quickly obvious that Eat Street in Brisbane was based on this night market, but this one was at least 10 times bigger. It’s supposedly the biggest open air market in the Southern Hemisphere.
You can see a letter K on the roof on the right. There is a J, I, H down to A, to give an indication of how many more rows like this there are and how big it is.
David
