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| One good thing about rainy days: rainbows! |
| Glenn's Journals 12-29-02 & 12-30-02 Victoria Sunday morning and we are up early so we can beat the crowd to the Victoria Market. The market is well known and is especially popular on Sundays. With limited parking and it being the first Sunday after Xmas it could be very busy or not at all. We arrived at the market around 8:45 am and found plenty of parking available. At the same time most of the vendors were just setting up for the day so we may have been a little early, but you never know. The fruit and vegetable market was going strong by now as that part of the market opens quite early (around 6am or so). We started at the north end of the market where the stores were open, hoping to give the vendors in the stalls more time to open. We spent 3 hours walking through the market, including actually picking up a few things while we shopped. We purchased a few more souvenirs for the house and a couple of gifts for friends back home. We even stopped at Ersatz Diamonds and bought a few pieces as well. We were pretty pleased with our shopping day at the Victoria Market. We drove to St. Kilda, a beach community just south of town center, where they held another market along the pier and oceanfront. Parking was a little trickier but we found some 2 hour parking on a back street. We were hungry at this point and stopped in to Greasy Joe's Diner for lunch. It seemed extremely busy so we thought it to be a good choice. The service was very slow and the food, once delivered, was not all that spectacular for the price. Erin had canneloni which, like the pizza we had last night, was lacking in any sauce. We are not sure why the Australians leave much of the sauce off their Italian dishes except that maybe we have not found a good Italian restaurant in Australia yet. After lunch we strolled around St. Kilda where we enjoyed the music playing loudly on the beach and walked along the main road where the market was located. The market in St. Kilda is more of an artistic market, whereas the market in Victoria is more of a formal "flea" market like we have in the states. We found an interesting piece at St. Kilda's that we had to have. I think Erin was a little suprised about how supportive I was on spending money today, but we have not bought many souvenirs from Australia yet so we were due. We completed our stroll around St. Kilda's around 3pm and headed south towards Brighton Beach. Brighton Beach is a quaint little beach community. Along the beach they still have brightly colored beach "huts" that families own where they keep all of their beach supplies. The "huts" are a continual controversy for the local government as they sit on government property but provide an income and a tourist attraction which the public is more than glad to keep. On a clear day you can take a great photo of the beach "huts" with the Melbourne city skyline in the background. We took the photo but it was definitely an overcast day and rain had started to sprinkle. It was almost 4pm and the weather today had been humid and hot (35C- 88F) and we were not used to it yet. We headed home for a little nap time. Erin and I took naps for a few hours before dinner. Dinner was a wonderful salad prepared by Elaine which included home made salad dressing. After dinner we relaxed, watched a little television, and then called it a night. 12-30-02 Victoria This morning we were up early again so we could head into town to, hopefully, get some work done on the website and see some more of the city center. We took the train into town again today and got off at the Melbourne Central station. This put us right on Elizabeth St which had a few listings for internet cafes. It didn't take us long to find one that was running at a decent speed. Once we had logged on the website page builder seemed to be up and running well today so Erin and I spent 3 hours working on the website before tiring and heading off to lunch. We went across the street for lunch into this huge multilevel mall. Our first stop ended up being at the Australian Geographic store where we located two books that Erin was interested in. After purchasing them we found our way to the food court where we ordered chicken ceasar wraps and a smoothie for lunch. After lunch we were rested and excited to see how much more progress we could make on the website. We figured that while the page builder is running good that we should take advantage. We found ourselves back in the internet cafe for another 3 hours before we finally had to leave to make dinner by 7:00 pm.We took the train back to Ivanhoe where we picked up our car and returned home by 6:45 pm. Monday night at the Andersons is family night, where every week the whole family comes over for dinner. The whole family made it for dinner tonight and we spent a few hours chatting about all kinds of political and newsworthy topics around the dinner table. We cleaned up around 9:00 pm when some folks started to head home. The rest of the evening was relaxing before we retired for bed around 11:00 pm. |