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| The Melboune Skyline at night. What an ominous look during an overcast day in the city!! |
| Erin's Journal 12-29-02 & 12-30-02 Victoria Sunday we also wanted to do some of the tourist stuff around town. We started with the Victoria Market, an invention of a mayor a few years ago. It's been a marketplace for a long time, but in the face of development schemes, this mayor fought to keep the market and instigated a Sunday tourist day, and sure enough it took off. So we got there early, as Elaine told us parking can get bad on a Sunday. We arrived about quarter to 9am, so most of the merchants weren't quite set up yet. Also it was really gusty and windy, so some of the ones who were already set up were busy anchoring all their goods. Still, we had fun and found a few more things to add to our box to ship home. We spent about 3 hours before getting tired and making it through all the rows. After the Victoria Market, we needed to find lunch, and decided to drive down toward Brighton Beach. We'd seen some postcards of the colorful beachfront shacks that made the place famous, and it was only about 20 minutes away. We managed to find it without too much misdirection, but first stopped off in St. Gilda for an arts & crafts fair that the map advertised for Sundays. We also found lunch there, although I feel that I really understand the popularity of fast food here now. The wait-staff here doesn't survive on tips like the ones back home do, so the service is terrible! We waited over an hour for our food, which should have been simple and quick! We were ready to walk out by the time our food came, and then the food itself was very bland and disappointing! I wished we'd gone to McDonalds or something, as shameful as that sounds! Anyway, after that we wandered around the little craft fair along the waterfront there, and weren't impressed with much. We did make one interesting find though, but can't elaborate as it's a gift for friends! It's hard to find good souvenirs that have a little something different about them; this one was really cool, but didn't fit 'us', so we got it for the friends we felt it matched up to. Interesting, how gift-buying makes you speculate about your friends' taste! The day wasn't very nice out, so it wasn't a day to go sit on the beach and read and relax, as we'd hoped for. We drove down to Brighton Beach and found the colorful shacks, but it wasn't a great day to hang out there, and I was getting really pooped. We stayed long enough to look, take a couple of quick photos, then agreed to go home for a nap. Ah, our tough life... 12-30-02 Victoria On Monday, we took advantage of another free day to get downtown on the train and try to do webwork again. We hadn't seen much of interest to us in the guidebook on Melbourne city, so we just got off at a different stop than last time and took a short walk down the street before finding an internet cafe and settling in for some serious web updating. We sat next to each other and belted out 3 hours of work, as the server was finally working, we had journals and photos uploaded to work with, and the internet connection was fast enough. It felt like the planets had aligned or something - a major event! We have been so cursed on this trip as far as finding places to get journals and photos downloaded, or finding time we can take off to do this stuff, and getting the right connection speed and finding the web server functioning... Anyway, by the time it was 1:30, we knew we needed to go get lunch (we'd been eating lunch late afternoons and consquently missing dinner with our hosts, but tonight was a family dinner event which we would not miss). We were reluctant to leave the internet cafe though, as we were on such a roll and wanted to get everything done. But we tore ourselves away and went across the street to a 5 story mall witih a foodcourt. We took about 30 minutes to eat and relax, then did a little bit more shopping. There were a couple of books I was looking for, and we managed to find them on sale in one of the stores there! Score! When we returned to the internet cafe though, it was busier and we had to wait a bit for a computer. I ran down the street to get some postcard stamps, and when I got back Glenn was on a computer. I finally got one too, and after about 5 minutes on mine, the seat next to Glenn cleared out, so I moved. We worked till 6pm, then hurried to the train to get home before dinner at 7. We even had time to get a bottle of wine first! Dinner was fun - the Andersons get together every week for dinner, with a minimum of 9 people each time! This time it was 13, and a very fun group to be with. They chatted spiritedly about various topics, and you could tell everyone was very close. It was a wonderful time to share with them, just as the Christmas holiday was. I stayed up to read, while Glenn crashed early. |