Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Return to Melbourne

The morning after our stunning trip to the Grampians, we boarded the 7:10 am train for Melbourne. The train trip takes a little over 3 hours. I had two meetings scheduled with academic friends, and Andy and I wanted to explore Melbourne a bit more. We planned to visit some museums and, of course, eat some more.
This was not the fine dining that we had in mind - Taco Bill's. The menu looked a lot like Taco Bell.


Sunday afternoon we went to the Melbourne Museum and explored some of the natural history of Australia. However, the indigenous exhibit we went to see doesn't start until next month. Another reason to go back! On Monday, we visited the National Gallery of Victoria where there was a long line for the Monet exhibit. We skipped Monet and explored the rest of the gallery which is FREE! The water features outside of the gallery were very beautiful.



The water feature inside of the gallery was gorgeous as well. The floating dishes in this "pond" made beautiful music as they knocked into one another. Each bowl and plate were of different depths and thickness and the result was lilting tones. You can see some of the school kids in the back. They were everywhere in the city that day, adorned in their varying school uniforms. I've never seen so many kids, both boys and girls, in ties.


This was an actual taxidermy deer covered in glass globes of varying sizes. The glass globes glittered - the picture doesn't do it justice.


Before we left, we decided to go up to the top of the Eureka Tower. We posted about this building in an earlier post about Melbourne architecture. The observation deck is on the 88th floor - incredible views of the city in all directions. In this picture, you can see the National Gallery to the right of the great spire on top of the Arts Centre Melbourne. In between them, if you look really closely, you can see the white nautilus water feature from the picture above, but I doubt you'll see the seagull. In the background, on the other side of the Yarra River, are the sporting grounds where professional cricket and Aussie Rules Football are played.



On Monday, we were making our way up Collins St., against the 5 pm pedestrian traffic who were headed toward Southern Cross train station. We were about to be washed over by the wave of people coming down the hill toward us. It is not wise to get between someone who just got off work and their ride home.

We made that same trip today when we boarded a very crowded train back to Warrnambool. It was a lively trip home featuring a large and noisy group of senior citizens who had just returned from a tour of the UK, a prolonged stop at Geelong where a gentleman was removed by local police after he refused to give up his illegal open can of booze to the conductor, and after that a second drunk who was relocated to the back of the train to sleep it off. Sheesh!

We walked home from the train station, enriched by our trip to the city, but glad to be back in our cozy little Australian home.

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