Sydney - Melbourne June 10, 2006

So, I spent a relatively restless night for some strange reason. Although I was tired, I still kept waking up through the night. Finally, I just gave up and woke up at about 7 AM. By this time, I was pretty famished and so I went downstairs and ordered the "Big Breakfast"which included 3 eggs, sausage, bacon, baked beans, and coffee. The bacon here is more like what we could call "ham strips" as opposed to the "bacon"we're familiar with. The sausages look and taste quite different from what we have at home. Despite being incredibly hungry, I couldn't finish it all.

I don't recall if I provided much detail on the backpacker hostel I was staying at in Sydney. It was quite nice. It provides all the basics of a place to stay with none of the luxuries. Your room is small and contains a bed and two towels, along with a couple of small cheap soaps. That's all. No wardrobe, no table, no locker. Just enough to live out of. On the other hand, there's great security. You can't even go up to any of the living floors until you insert your room card into the elevator.

I took the shuttle to the airport and headed to Melbourne. The flight was quite comfortable and uneventful. Melbourne is definitely cold. While I didn't even need a jacket in Sydney, Melbourne needs a couple of layers and even with my three layers and the light jacket, I was cool ("cold"would be too strong a word for someone from Duluth). The shuttle brought me to the Greenhouse Backpacker Hostel. This place seems a little downscale from the Wake Up! but still has decent looking security. The big difference here is that the room doesn't have an attached bathroom and everyone on a floor shares bathrooms. Not even a TV in this one. The room, again, is still quite spartan and is essentially good enough to sleep in.

Melbourne still seems to me to be a city with more "character"than Sydney. This is an impression I formed last time and so dar, just based on the brief drive to the hostel, it seems to persist. I'll probably head out for a walk now and just soak in the ambience. Tomorrow afternoon, Graeme will pick me up and head to his place, returning to the city for the show.

BTW, something VERY interesting. The keyboard I am using has almost ALL of the keys with rubbed off labels. So, I don't know what most of the characters are. Initially, it was unnerving - I couldn't even type in the password to log in to my blogspot account. Then, I just let go and let me fingers do the typing without worrying about which keys I was hitting. Amazingly, I am actually typing this quite fast right now and finding I am familiar enough with the keyboard to be able to type with unlabeled keys for the most part. It is like I'm "feeling the force." The force is flowing through me ...

Okay, it is official - Melbourne is DEFINITELY a nicer city than Sydney. I can't really put my finger on it. I went out for a walk at about 3 PM and just LOVED walking around this city. It has so many intersting little shops. There are so many more people walking around. I don't know. For an analogy, Sydney is more like Minneapolis while Melbourne is more like New York City. I don't mean literally, but imagine yourself walking around downtown Minneapolis. Now imagine walking around Times Square in NYC. See what I mean? Melbourne is much more interesting to walk around. There are also all these little alleys bustling with little shops that remind me of Europe. This is the city I wish I had more time in. I bought a PC game - Cricket! Should be interesting. I found a store selling my bana candy and bought a couple of packs so I could make sure they are exactly the ones I always liked. Then I stopped by a little hole in the wall called the "Curry Bowl" and picked up some stuff for dinner and headed back to the hostel. Just before I got back, I found a great little used CD store called Dragonfly and found some nice CDs to bring home - including "The Best of Rolf Harris" (of Jake the Peg, Court of King Caractacus, and Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport, fame). In the room, I had my dinner (I was hungry again by this time) and decided to head down to the bar in the basement so I could stay awake for a while and adjust better to australia time (you get free wireless access if you buy a drink every half an hour!) Unfortunately, I just could not keep my eyes open and suddenly woke up to find it was 11:45 PM. Of course, I was too tired to go anywhere and I changed into my pyjamas and went to sleep. Again, it wasn't a really great night as there were people talking in the hallways almost all the night. To top it off, I found myself wide awake at 4:40 AM. I lay in bed concentrating hard on going back to sleep (it never works) and finally gave up and got up at about 6:30 AM.