Weekend in the "Big Smoke"

I love learning the language of Australia. The "big city" is known here as the big smoke. This weekend we were off to Melbourne to explore some new sights with our friend Nathan. Nathan is an American academic colleague now working at a Melbourne university and he offered to host us on our exploration of where he lives on the Mornington Peninsula, the southeastern suburbs.

View from the train

View through a dirty window on the train

Our arrival at Southern Cross Station in Melbourne

The train ride to Melbourne is 3.5 hours and there are three trains a day. It makes about 8-10 stops along the way in small towns between here and the city. It might seem like a long way to go, but it's an easy trip. There's a small snack shop in the train where you can get halfway decent coffee and some microwave-ready meat pies or sausage rolls. Andy sleeps. Or we chat with the people who are sitting next to us or in the seats facing us. It's not uncommon to become friendly with people whose knees are kissing your knees. On Friday's trip we sat across from two 30-something women who boarded at Colac. They were two nurses, off to the city for a girls weekend. "What happens on girls weekend, stays there." (We ended up on the same train home on Sunday. And by the looks of things, what happened on girls weekend was a lot of shopping.)

We had planned this particular weekend in the city because we wanted to go see the Melbourne Boomers vs. the Canberra Capitals (national level women's basketball) on Saturday night. Nathan had plans to see the symphony on Friday night so we we joined him and he joined us on Saturday. The symphony was the Russian Masters and I think Andy and Nathan enjoyed it quite a lot. I did too, but I was more psyched to see the basketball.

The basketball game was fun but not what we are used to seeing in the WNBA. The game was held at the State Basketball Center which appears to be a venue for all levels of basketball, mostly hosting kids' leagues, and it felt like a college gym. It was cool to see kids lined up along the court sitting in bean bags and enjoying the game, but there were no cheerleaders, loud music, or t-shirt give-aways. Because Australian universities don't have intercollegiate sports teams (all sports are played in regional leagues), and because professional athletes also often hold a full time job, the status of professional athletics is different from what we are used to in the US. Most of the players are in their 20's and the level of play was competitive. The game was tied with a minute left in the game and the Boomers sunk a three-pointer and added three more points to win by six.

Boomers are in purple, just like our former Sacramento Monarchs

The half time show was pint-size players with some serious game

During the day on Saturday, Nathan took us to the end of the peninsula where we could walk along the ocean side of the coast. We noticed many of the lifeless shearwater bodies on this beach as well. Fortunately, there were a lot of beautiful things to look at also: kids sliding down the beach dunes on boogie boards, marathon runners on their beach leg of a 50K run, gorgeous rock formations, and coastal delights in all directions.

Summer sledding

This is a little reminiscent of Crazy Horse for me

On Sunday afternoon, Nathan dropped us at the Frankston train station where we caught a metro train into the city. At Southern Cross Station, we boarded our "country train" back to Warrnambool. On our trip home we talked about how great it would be to be able to board a train in Chico that gets to San Francisco 3+ hours later. No traffic, no parking, no hassle.

Our route home