All Hail Don Bradman

Today was a more relaxed day. I got up early and decided I had to try and get work done despite the state of Internet access. So, I managed to connect using VPN and was able to get through a lot of my emails instead of just connecting and taking care of a few urgent ones. So, I let the kids sleep as I worked on the computer. They slept until almost 10:30 in the morning - the first day we didn't have packed with activities.

Once the kids got up and slowly got ready, it was almost time to head into town and return the rental car. We drove back to the car rental place and returned the car without incident. The car rental turned out to be one of the best decisions we made. I think I can safely say I saved hundreds of dollars renting and driving all over the place instead of doing the day coach trips for all three of us. After returning the car, we wandered around Queen Victoria Market again for a while. We spent quite a lot of time wandering around the market and finally decided we'd seen enough stalls selling cheap Chinese-made souvenirs, expensive local handicrafts, and cheesy "hard sell" toys and knick knacks. We felt we had done the market justice until we walked outside and found that we had barely covered half of the vast market.

We found a small, interesting-looking cafe called "Coconut House Malaysian Food" and decided to try our luck there. It was promising that when we went in, we were the only non-Malaysians in there. Eventually a couple of other non-malay-appearing people came in, but it was clear that this was a popular place among the Malay locals. The food was absolutely delicious and I would not be surprised to learn that this is actually a well-known Malaysian-Chinese food outlet.

We then just wandered around town, stopping in at numerous stores on Swanston Street. We stepped into a nice little Japanese mini mart that had interesting foods. We bought some peach Fanta and pineapple Fanta. The pineapple Fanta was fantastic and we all agreed that the peach Fanta tasted like cough medicine. We found a Target store and wandered around in there too, just for the heck of it.

As we headed back to the hotel, Jay and I decided to walk across the street and visit the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) while Sheila just headed back to the hotel room to update her blog. Unfortunately, the last tour was at 3:20 PM and it was almost 5 PM by this time. So, we satisfied ourselves by going into the gift shop and buying a mini cricket ball and a foam stress ball shaped like a cricket ball. They also had an incredibly cute "real" stitched cricket ball, but at $15, I just couldn't get myself to buy it even though it was incredibly cute. We then wandered around and I took photos of Jay by large sculptures of Don Bradman, Dennis Lillee, Shane Warne and other great Victoria cricketers.

When we got back to the hotel room, we invented the incredible game of "bed cricket" involving the mini cricket bat and the stress ball. We developed an elaborate set of rules that inevitably resulted in many loud arguments on whether the batsman was out or not. Since this was the first day of a game that will eventually become famous the world over, we had to keep developing rules as we played to deal with the different circumstances that came up.

At about 7:30 PM, Graeme and Karen picked us up for dinner. We went to the Union Hotel pub where we met with John, one of their friends. We enjoyed a couple of Tasmanian White Rabbit brews. I had both a White Rabbit White Ale and one Dark Ale. Of course I preferred the dark ale. I had Chicken Parmigiana for dinner that was good. Jay fell asleep early in the evening and then, after dinner, was kept awake by Graeme's amazing skills at coaster-flip-catch. I'd like to modestly say that I developed some basic skills in the art too. We got back fairly late and went to bed quickly since we had already done most of our packing before we left for dinner.