Magnificent Melbourne

Down the road from Geelong is one of Australia's main cities, Melbourne. It's also the main city of the state of Victoria. As it turns out Melbourne and Sydney have a great rivalry. We're spending similar time in both so we can judge for ourselves. Sydney is supposed to be the brash beach and harbour city whilst Melbourne has the style and culture. This appears so at first glance. From the highway the skyline looms in the distance and looks modern and glassy. Much bigger than Perth and once we got into the centre we realised it's a totally different proposition, i.e. it's good. The streets have a kind of New York look about them, from what I've seen in pictures of New York that is. I like it. Melbourne looks modern but also has many grand buildings from times gone by that are in immaculate condition, probably because it's not too old!
After a quick drive through the centre we had to find our way out to a campsite. As always in Australia this sounds easy but never turns out so. The road signs in Australia must be amongst the worst in the world. Large signs will tell you what road is coming up, or that you're about to pass, but not where the road leads to. This is incredibly annoying. You can drive for a good half an hour before seeing a sign telling you that you're going in the wrong direction. It happens all the way through the trip and is one of my biggest annoyances of Oz. Another annoyance is the incredibly hyper kids here. I don't know what they're fed, oodles of fried mars bars most likely, but the kids up to even early twenties have either slight mental problems or are just on a constant sugar high. Many bus or train rides have proved this time and again. We endure many an hour on public transport all through Asia and all were fine but Australia is a different prospect altogether. It's incredibly depressing on public transport here.
Our first day in Melbourne was spent mostly looking round a Pixar exhibition in the Animation museum on the great Federation Square. Pixar, if you don't already know, made films such as Cars, Monsters Inc., Toy Story and the like. I'm not normally into this type of thing but I have to say it's probably the best exhibition I've ever seen anywhere ever. The artwork that goes into these films is unbelievable and mostly a lot better than some of the guff we've seen in supposed art galleries. After the exhibition we stayed in the same place to have a nosey in a room called The Memory Grid. This is a collection of booths where you can sit and watch upto 300hours of independent films, from skateboarding to far out art movies. A very cool idea and completely free. A good way to spend your lunch hour if you worked in the city. Another room in the same place was full of pc's where you can play independent computer games. These were created by people at home to enter into a national competition and it was brilliant. You can spend as long as you like messing around on different games all for zero cash. It was certainly a different day to what we've had anywhere else on the trip and a very good one at that.
Walking the city you quickly see how varied the populous is here. A massive Chinese population aswell as a huge Indian population make for varied and interesting areas. I liked it a lot. It's very odd that we've been through soo many one horse towns, some nice some you'd rather drown yourself than stay longer than 15 minutes in, and the population generally consisted of 300 white blokes. And then you get to somewhere like Melbourne where people from all over the globe live and it's a lot better for it.
You don't have to wander the streets too much if you don't want either, a free tram is available that gives you information about the place as it takes you round. It just has a good vibe about it, quirky art things are everywhere here, art and music are big here and it shows. There's also a couple of small European style streets full of trendy cafes and restaurants. There's definitely some class here that doesn't exist in the majority of Australia.
At night most of the city looks beautiful against the main river flowing through it, the Yarra. It's well lit up and is good for a wander along, some kayak the river at night but I thought it was way too cold!
Another free exhibition was on here also. It was mainly over the top art guff but some it was really funny. There was one really long video from the guys who made the Honda commercial that had bits of the car knocking other bits of the car into other bits in a massive chain reaction. Amazing stuff and well worth a look. They're German guys I think but I can't remember their names. Another short video we saw was of a Korean guy standing side on to the camera. He was tasked with guessing what items were hitting his head from off screen. He was bad at guessing but some of the items would've been tough to guess when flying at the back of your head, a chair, tv, toaster, sofa,computer and other stuff that looked like it really hurt!
There are plenty of music venues and places to eat and drink here and loads to do for free if you like. Just wandering around the new harbour area near the large Aussie Rules stadium was good. Melbourne is also famed for its love of sport and a few teams co-exist here, a couple of large stadiums lay testament to this.
I really like this place, apart from the long commute to it, and the surrounds. It's definitely a place worth coming back to and I think I will.
Luckily whilst we were there we got to stay with Laura's old boss, which was brilliant. Especially because they put us up for a few days, oh the home comforts we've been without for so long. It was really good to have a base and relax for a few days and not have to sleep in that frickin cold van! Thanks very much guys!!
We also took in a great museum, fantastic building which was mostly better than the art. I was sick of aboriginal art by this point. I've seen loads of it and generally just think it's crap. There are some ok pieces but in the whole it's garbage, more so the stuff with horribly drawn people. We did see some great stuff from a guy called Geoffrey Bartlett. Very evil looking stuff, would and metal based stuff mostly, and it reminded me of artwork found in a Tool album, metal!
Before we left we also got to check out one of the areas just outside of Melbourne, and a great war memorial park on the way, St Kilda. It's quite a bohemian almost hippie type place but with a large mix of drinkers too. It's good though and has quirky bars and very late night patisseries, for the munchies I presume, and arty shops selling antiques to clothes to music. There's a beach and harbour here too but we couldn't see too much of that at night. It would be a great place to live, expensive, due to it's locale to Melbourne and for that fact that it just seemed relaxed. There were a couple of street performers here, fancy swallowing a sword?...thought not.
We had to do it. Just had to. It's not my fault. Honest. On the way our from Melbourne we drove to the street where they shoot the Neighbours tv show. I don't know why but I had to go! It was tiny. We drove up it and took a couple of snaps before hastily driving away in embarrassment.
Melbourne was great, the best city in Australia so far by a country mile. And it seems it's in the best, even though on of the smallest, states of Australia. Victoria. As we find out Victoria has even more to offer than the beach and surf towns of the Great Ocean road and Melbourne. The most southerly tip of mainland Australia, Wilsons Promontory(or Wilsons Prom as everyone calls it) next.