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[Jan. 12th, 2009|06:14 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  cheerful | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Little Red Corvette, Prince | ] |
...And we're back. Well, we were back last night, but spent most of last night trying to make a fair bash at unpacking. I still haven't put everything away, but *shrugs*.
It was awesome. We went to Wicked. We did most of the touristy things, though we missed a couple - I got a cold halfway through and kept having to have a rest. But we were planning on taking it slowly anyway - Chris' last trip to Melbourne was what you'd call 'whirlwind', and my father's idea of a holiday is to drive forever then crash. So it was nice to take our time, and not be in any particular hurry.
A not particularly exhaustive list of points:
* It was mostly drama free, having booked the essentials before we got there. There were a couple of minor quibbles: things like the hotel not being able to read our cards, so we had to race to the nearby ATM to get the cash to pay for it. Oh, and the "getting sick" thing.
* We stayed at the City Limits hotel at the top end of Little Bourke Street. It was okay - not particularly exciting, but we were mostly after a place to crash anyway. It had the virtue of being close to transport (essentially next to Paliment Station, and just between two Spring Street tram stops). It also provided free breakfast, though it was just cereal and toast - but having that most of the days saved us a bit of cash.
* The mode of transport we made most use of was the City Circle tram, which had a highly convenient route, ringing the grid, but was obviously tourist oriented - it's one of those things that has a recorded commentary running the entire time. It even had a cheesy theme song, which Chris purchased on CD.
* We took a tour to the Great Ocean Road and the Twelve Apostles. It was very pretty, but a fairly long day. There are a number of tour operators running - we picked the one we did because it had a free lunch (which we expected to just be sandwiches, but wound up being a fair bit more - the tour company had a pet roadhouse at Lavener's Hill, and we had our pick of a selected menu), and they were running a special - for no apparent reason, but it was like $45 off the normal price, so we weren't complaining.
* We headed to St Kilda, and checked out Luna Park and the rest. While we were riding the Scenic Railway (the big roller coaster), I saw what looked like a children's garden nearby, so we went over to check it out and came across "Veg Out", a community garden/art project - people were growing things, and leaving sculptures and things throughout their plot. While we were sitting beside the beach, a guy wandered past holding a babe-in-arms of a puppy. He said to his friends, "I think I'll go swimming" - then I watched, horrified, as has idea of 'swimming' was to wade out into the water, hurl the dog away, then swim over to fetch it. I'm presuming that the dog was enjoying this (we were too far away and there was too much other stuff happening to figure out if it was distressed), but I certainly didn't enjoy watching it.
* We hit a number of art galleries. I was reminded again of how utterly massive NGV is. The Felton bequest gave them a lot more money to throw around than most galleries have, and they've made the most of it - we just kept finding new sections. While we were looking at the Medieval/Renaissance art, Chris asked me who Madonna was. Grargh!
* Checked out the laneways, though we really only came across DeGraves Street/Central Place and Hardware Lane.
* Visited the two different observation decks, one at dusk, and one in daylight.
* I dragged him clothes shopping, and he nodded patiently as I complained that everything in the shop sucked. Eventually I came away with about four shirts, but it seemed like I'd tried on absolutely everything in the store in the meantime.
* Of course, we went to Queen Victoria Market. We went midweek, so it was a mite less packed, though it was still busy. Chris has been collecting together artworks for his room; he spent comparatively vast amounts on an embroidered image of Flinders Street Station, which would have been more expensive for him if I hadn't offered to cushion some of the cost. I have a feeling he still would have bought it anyway.
* And as I mentioned earlier, we went to see Wicked. We'd thought it was no longer playing, but they still had posters everywhere. So we ducked into the ticket office, and we found out there were still plenty of tickets. The theatre was selling "Ozmopolitan" cocktails - which were fluoro green with a glass that lit up in a revolving array of colours.
* We discovered that someone had been hacking the State Library of Victoria's index machines, and managed to obtain access to the C: drive. When we rebooted the machine, the hack had been lost, but I discovered that they weren't proxy filtering the content streamed to the machine - if you went into File -> Open... (they'd hidden the address bar, of course), you could type in any URL you wanted and would be able to open it - though for some reason, SMH was convinced that we were a mobile browser.
Instead of dragging my laptop, I took my PDA with me. It's a lot lighter and easier to lug, and it's possible to view most websites in at least some capacity whenever you can obtain free wifi. I only managed to find a decent hotspot a couple of times, but that was enough to clear the inbox periodically and stuff like that. Of course, it was still overflowing when I got home.
We returned to discover that my father has decided to take a road trip to South Australia to buy some jewellery made of jade for my mother. Because the shops in Sydney were unsuitable, or something. He apparently left first thing yesterday morning, and had managed to get to Broken Hill by the evening. ...Right...?
Now I guess I should start getting ready for my first workday of the year. Joy.
-Mmaster |
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