Meandering in Melbourne

This initial post is coming to you from Melbourne, Australia. Truth be told, I am actually staying in Geelong, Australia more precisely (about an hour south of Melbourne). I've been here for some 4 days so here's how it's been so far.

The trip down here actually started on Thursday July 1, 2010. I am lucky enough that my company flies us, internationally, in business class. After a quick trip from Dallas to Los Angeles, I boarded DL17; a 15 hour Delta flight from LAX to Sydney. Again, THANK GOODNESS for business class. The lay-flat seats were phenomenal. Three movies and some z's and I was in Sydney (albeit 2 hours delayed) on Saturday morning (yes, Friday was skipped). This delay caused my coworkers and I to miss our scheduled connection to Melbourne, but we were rescheduled on a later flight and made it to Melbourne an hour after we were supposed to. No big deal.

We were all feeling pretty excited to be here, so we decided to go to our hotel in Geelong, shower and rest up before returning to Melbourne. That plan seemed great until the "rest" part. After a 2 hour nap, none of us were in the mood to go back to Melbourne. Actually, I never even got out of bed the rest of the day. I slept from 3:30pm until the next day. OK, I woke up quite a few times during the night, but jet lag was a killer. That 15 hour time change was doing a number on me. The good news was that our Four Points Sheraton accommodations were very nice; including the view.

So I woke up refreshed on Sunday and headed up to Melbourne.  We left the car in the city and used the fabulous public transportation to get around.  Trams are the favored public transportation and Melbourne has a free tram that goes around the city; providing you with verbal information about the city.  It's like a free guided tour.  There is also a free bus that does the same thing.  SWEET!  The visitor's center recommended we go to Queen Victoria Market to get a good feel for Melbourne.  So we headed over to the market.  What and AWESOME place.  It's an open air market with all sort of clothing, souvenirs, jewelry, food and more for sale at amazing prices.  I even realized that the exact same souvenirs I had purchased in Perth in January were a fraction of the price at this market.  We went hog wild in buying goodies and souvenirs.  I even picked up a backpack to carry everything (if you read the other blog you know I lost my daypack).  One of the highlights for me was the corn.  I couldn't help but purchase a cup of corn; nicely soaking in butter.  I also couldn't help myself in trying some of the other local attire.

After lunch, a few hours at the market and a full backpack, we headed to Southbank.  We heard it was a pretty cool hangout and included a casino.  We took the free bus and heard about some other cool facts and places to visit in the city; mental note for next week's visit.  Southbank was definitely more upscale than the market.  All your high end retailers were there and a very fancy casino.  Outside the Southbank entertainment center was my friend the Jabulani soccer ball from South Africa.  Evidently, there are people inside this one for the duration of the World Cup; publicity stunt anyone?  Anyways, the casino was our destination.  Something was weird about this casino. Sure there were all the slots and many gaming tables, but something just wasn't right.  The gaming tables!!!  There were some 50 roulette tables, 50 baccarat tables, 15 blackjack tables and just ONE craps table.  Roulette and baccarat were the games of choice here.  And boy were they being played.  The players at these tables were a young crowd dropping $200-$2000 A HAND at the baccarat tables.  What the heck????  Hey, hand me the money if you want to blow that much cash.  Anyways, I didn't gamble; I just enjoyed watching the high rollers and my coworkers get cleaned out.

After a quick dinner it was time to head back to Geelong to get a good night's sleep before work on Monday.  As we were walking to the tram to take to our car, we were treated to a nice fire show along the water.  Fireballs blew out of the columns; pretty cool.  I got a very good vibe in Melbourne.  I am definitely looking forward to spending a full weekend here.





The rest of the week will probably not bring up anything interesting; work beckons.  I'll hit y'all back up next weekend with a report of a full weekend in Melbourne (if our plans work out).  If anything interesting happens during the week, I'll sneak a post in here and there; maybe with some random thoughts from "down unda."