Albert Heights Apartments, Melbourne, Australia. 3275 kmÂ
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Australian word of the day:Â Maxi-taxi. A mini-van/van taxi. The only vehicle that can fit all of us including our luggage.
Greetings from Melbourne, Victoria’s capital, and a lovely city indeed. We arrived last night and spent our first day sweltering in an unusually hot (30C) spring day. Nevertheless, we had a superb day.
I’ll rewind a bit to tell you of our last two days in the Brisbane area. We drove up from Byron Bay on Friday morning, making good time. Unfortunately we got lost in Brisbane’s northern suburbs looking for our campground and wasted 30 minutes getting back on track. We spent Friday afternoon and Saturday morning playing around with the kids and slowly packing ourselves back into our duffle bags. Yesterday (Saturday) afternoon we returned the RV and took a maxi-taxi to the airport. We had plenty of time to wait for our flight and the children and I ran around the gate area playing silly games.
The flight was short, a mere 2 hours, and we were on the ground in Melbourne at 9pm. Amazingly all 10 pieces of our checked items arrived intact. We have 4 duffle bags, a book bag (very heavy), a beach bag (swimsuits, towels, floaties), 3 car seats, and the stroller. Each time we have to schlep to and from an airport I get a great upper body workout.
A courteous maxi-taxi driver took us to our apartment, and we settled in to our home for the next 4 days. We are about 20 minutes walking distance from the city center, or 5 minutes by tram. The apartment has 2 rooms and a kitchen, which is a configuration we have found to be optimal with our kids. We can have breakfast and supper at home, and lunch on the city.
Despite our late arrival last night, Ron got up bright and early and convinced Shirt to join. So a bit weary eyed we got organized and headed of to hit the streets of the city. As I mentioned, the weather today was very atypical for Melbourne at this time of year. But as locals like to say, Melbourne can go through four seasons in one day.
We took a tram to Federation Square and headed to the information center. I have never seen such a huge info center. It’s the size of a small museum. After getting some data, we headed to a nice café for brunch. The kids enjoyed pancakes and I enjoyed a good espresso. Paola did not fare so well with her cappuccino. This is supposed to be a good town for coffee.
We then dropped in on a few cultural places, all were free to our surprise. We started with ACMI, Australian Center for Moving Image. They had 2 nice exhibits. One was game.lab with interactive video games to play with. The other was a short animation expo, with 1-3 minute works by art students from around the world. There were a few funny ones that the kids really liked. Some were scary too.
We visited a design center with a nice poster exhibit around the subject of rain. We then headed to an art museum. All this is happening in Federation Square. At the museum we enjoyed the aboriginal works on the first floor. Their unique style uses many small dots to create a large image. There was a fun spot for kids on the second floor where they could draw, glue and paste. Ron Shir and Orr spent some time there with me while Paola explored other parts of the museum.
We had our fill of culture and headed out to the heavy midday heat. As a strategy for the next few hours we walked only on the shaded sides of the streets. Melbourne is very pretty and many people were out and about. All three kids fell asleep in the stroller, with Ron squishing Orr and then Shir trying to find an optimal position for himself in the third seat he created on the double stroller.
When the kids woke up we found ourselves in a public library with a cool interactive section for kids. We read some books, played a bit and then headed back to the apartment.
Tomorrow should be a bit cooler.
Good Night,
-Hemi
This entry was posted on Sunday, October 21st, 2007 at 5:34 am and is filed under Australia, Big Trip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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