Melbourne Welcome: Day 3

Last night’s bar crawl was a ton of fun (a “heap” of fun, as they would say here).  I went early with a group of European girls to the first bar and sipped on a beer with them until the rest of the group came.  Unlike in the states, where mixed drinks are more expensive, the economical way to drink in a bar here is to buy “basics,” which is basically mixed drinks with mid-shelf booze.  We didn’t stay at that pub too long.  The next one was really cool.  It had a big balcony that looked onto the CBD street one story below.  A few people were dancing inside, but I mostly chilled outside.  The last bar was by far the most fun.  The hosts rented us a private room with its own bar and dance floor.  We were in control of the music, and it ended up being an incredible dance party.  I was dancing until I could barely move anymore at 1:30, when I walked back up Swanston Street to Queens with a few guys.  What a great time.  The bar scene here is a ton of fun.

Today was a long but incredible day.   In the morning my host took us on a tour of the uni campus.  It’s not a huge campus—in fact, I Princeton is probably just as big—but somehow it will accommodate 70,000 students in a couple weeks.

The campus is a mixture of moden concrete buildings and older Princeton-esque ones.

After the tour we went down to Queen Victoria Market at the edge of the CBD.  It’s a huge place, and it reminds me a lot of the shuk in Jerusalem.  There’s an indoor area where dozens of vendors sell fresh meat, cheese, pastries, and stuff like that.  The shopkeepers stood in the aisles shouting out prices.  Then there’s a tented outdoor fruit and vegetable market.  I’m not sure, but I’m guessing the fruit is fresher and cheaper than at the supermarket; it all looked pretty tasty.  The rest of Queen Vic Market is tents and tends of vendors selling souvenirs, art, luggage, wine, toys, shoes, and virtually anything else you can think of.  Plenty of locals were moseying around with their bags and carts picking up food and goodies.  It’s open five days a week, so I’ll definitely head back and check it out again.

A meat vendor at Queen Victoria Market.

You can buy live egg-laying birds!

We had lunch in a park next to the market, then we walked south towards the river to the Eureka tower.  At 300 meters, it is the tallest building in Australia and the tallest residential building in the southern hemisphere.  We headed up in the fastest elevator I’ve ever seen.  My ears popped, and in less than a minute we were on the 88^th floor, the Eureka Skydeck, where we got a breathtaking panoramic vantage of the city and the area around it.  I could literally see for miles.  Everything looked tiny from 10000 ft up there.  I could see the racetrack where the Melbourne Grand Prix will be in a few weeks.  I could see the entire Yarra river.  I could literally see everything.  There’s actually an outdoor cage that we could go into that’s exposed to the elements.  It gets pretty windy up there.  It started raining when we were up there, which was really cool because we were actually inside the cloud.  (The weather here is very temperamental; it can go from hot and sticky to windy and rainy really quickly.)  The tower was really awesome.

Eureka Tower is clearly taller than anything around it.

That's me, outside at the skydeck.

And that's the view that 300 meters gets you.

After the tower we took a tour of some of Melbourne’s laneways.  Laneways are essentially alleys, and a large portion of Melbourne’s shopping and cultural scene happens in them.  It’s pretty cool, because you have to navigate through these narrow twisty spots, through café tables and past vintage shops to find these out-of-the way places.  Some are indoors, some outdoors.  One of the outdoor ones was decorated with the most elaborate and provoking graffiti I’ve ever seen.  Calling it graffiti actually doesn’t do it justice, as it’s pure art—not oil on canvas, but spraypaint on brick.  Apparently a lot of people like to take wedding photos in the laneways, so there were a few couples and photographers.  They were riding in antique black Rolls Royces, which definitely made for an interesting juxtaposition against the colorful and modern street art.

A laneway.

Can you imagine how long it took to spray paint that?

Exhausted from a day of nonstop walking, we took the tram back to Queen’s for dinner.  Then we went back out to catch the end of the St. Kilda music festival.  On the tram I had my first taste of “goon,” which is the term for crappy boxed wine, the Australian equivalent of a thirty-rack of watery American beer.  It’s not that bad though (at least it's sweet), and it got me nice and ready for the coolest concert experience I’ve ever had, hands down.

The street leading to St. Kilda beach was closed off, and it was full of street performers (they’re called “buskers” here).  One group was a rapping reggae duo.  They were pretty cool.  Then there was a silent disco.  Imagine this: a dark tent full of twenty-somethings dancing their asses off, but it’s dead quiet.  They give everyone a pair of wireless headphones with three channels (red, blue, green, with a light indicating which one you were on so your friends could see) corresponding to the three DJs on the podium in the middle.  Even though we were all listening to different music, we were all able to rave together.  It was epic.  Everyone was smiling (I was ear to ear).  When the “silent” music ended we headed to the main venue.  I forget the name of the performer, but he was good (house music, of course). I vaguely remember passing a crowd surfer.  Again, more dancing, until he was done at about 10:30.  I went with a couple kids to a bar after because it was still relatively early.  We met these weird people in an alley on the way and talked with them for a while about random things, and then got to a pretty decent bar/club.  I only stayed for a little while, and then got on a tram to uni.  Luckily Melbourne University was the last stop on the line, because my not-so-sober self fell asleep on the.  It was really an exhausting day, but one I’ll remember for the rest of my life.

The silent disco--it sounds weird becaue you can't hear my headphones, but believe me it was awesome!

Total rave.

Tomorrow is the Melbourne Zoo.