Melbourne:: Week 6

it was the queen's b'day last weekend, well.. not really. her b'day was sometime during the week before or the week after, no one i asked really knows for sure. but nonetheless, monday was a national holiday for being the day of the queen's b'day. (you must have guessed it by now that it is not the current queen we are talking here.) ozzies do not have many public holidays in the first place, this being one of the 3 or 4 (there is this and there are x-mas, easter, and ... whatelse.. of yeah, the day after x-mas). so why not celebrate it in style. and rightly so, we flew to melbourne!!

after an hr flight from sydney, we reached avalon. avalon is separated from melbourne by about 40 mins drive and hosts the airport. you would think that it might be a suburb of melbroune, right? well, no. avalon is a place in the middle of nowhere. it is filled with nothingness except the airport and ofcourse its parking lot. and there is nothing around the airport, just green grass and some intermittent trees. as far as the eye can see. of yeah, and some really healthy grazing sheep too. once we got out of the plane, we rented a car and headed straight to the city.

melbourne is a much smaller city (a town?) than sydney and not as cosmopolitan. but, it is more ozzie. it is filled with ozzie culture, with old churches (well, relatively old) and, for some odd reason, with public parks. the city aligns itself on either side of the Yarra river and, as such, is beautiful. it is also the sporting hub of oz. we went down to the famous mcg (melbourne cricket ground), which was huge btw, and to rod lever arena, where we clicked this.

it is fall in oz. sydney being closer to california-type weather, we did not notice the changes much, but melbourne experiences the snowy weather, and therefore more susceptible to the apparent fall colors. the hues on the trees in almost all the parks we visited (most of them memorial) were pretty cool. it reminded me of up-state newyork. the biggest park had a remembrance memorial, for all the warriors oz lost in ww2.

while we checked out the city for the better part of the day, we took a break from it that evening and the next day, only to return the following morning. like always, we took a bunch of pickies (ozzie for pics, they tend to do this for quite a few words:: oz football is footy, chips are chippies, presents are prezzies, and barbeques are barbies). check them out.