Making the Most of Melbourne

I had 2 days between when my bus trip ended and when I was meeting up with my family in Sydney, so flew to Melbourne for about 36 hours to make sure to see Australia's second biggest city during my time Down Under. Basically, I had very little time to see a very large city. And I got to see and experience a on of it! This was thanks to a family friend of mine that lives in Melbourne, she was kind enough to show me around some of her favorite parts of the city. I saw so much more than what I would have seen doing it on my own, and had a wonderful time with her and her fiancé during those two days.

The city has this amazing feel of old and new meeting each other. Many of the buildings are heritage listed, with older beautiful architecture (below right), but huge sky scrapers dominate the CBD (top). There are many small arcades with stores, coffee shops, and restaurants. And the city sets aside certain arcades and alleyways for graffiti artists, so people have a place to express themselves without defacing property. They say that Melbourne experiences all four seasons in a day, and this was definitely true of my time there! I experienced 20 C and sun, 5 C, and 10 C and rain, all in one day, it was so weird, but the drastic weather changes reminded me a little of St. Louis :P

                                     

It's also a city of neighborhoods. I got to explore the CBD and South Melbourne with my friend, the first day I was there, and then checked out the Queen Victoria Markets (below left), Fitzroy (below right), and Carlton my second day. Melbourne is a city of food and coffee and I got the chance to shop and sample some of these treats, for a more detailed account check out the links above!

I really, really liked this city. I was extremely sad that I had so little time there, because I would have definitely wanted to explore more areas of the city and also take a drive out to the Great Ocean Road. But, sometimes things don't work out, so now I have a reason to come back to Australia so I can do some of the things that I missed. Even living there for 6 months and traveling heaps, I still didn't get to everything I wanted to do. This is in part because Oz is enormous, and also because when you travel anywhere it really is impossible to do everything. You just have to make the most of the time that you have, and I definitely did that both in Melbourne and in Australia as a whole!