26.03.-07.04.2018 MELBOURNE

After Rick dropped me of, I still had a 2h train/bus journey to the hostel in front of me. They had upgraded my 8-person dorm to a double room, which I shared with a guy named Drew. He got back to the hostel after going out for drinks that day, we still talked for quite a while before falling asleep. Before that, I spent the evening chatting to a French dancer, Lucie, who was absolutely lovely.

After that one night at the hostel, I stayed with Mitch, my next couchsurfing host. I got along with him really well, we have a similar take on the world, diet and politics and cooked together almost every day (okay to be honest he did most of the work, but I did most of the chopping!).

I spent a lot of the time in Melbourne walking around, from one place to another – it took me about 50min to reach CBD (meaning Central Business District, not Cannabidiol!) from Mitch’s place – since public transport there isn’t cheap (except for the free tram zone in the inner city, which is great!).

The State Library of Victoria had an exhibition on Ned Kelly at that time, they presented his suit of armor and told a lot about Melbourne’s and Victoria’s history. The main reading hall is beautiful to look at:

To find a book however, you have to go online and search for it, since there seems to be no proper sorting by genre or anything of the like. I decided to continue reading Dante’s Inferno, which I started in Ulladulla but never got to finish.

Melbourne’s shopping street is called Burke Street, the most striking part of it is an H&M inside of a listed building (meaning it’s World Heritage). Because of that status, H&M is only allowed to make superficial changes like putting up wallpaper, but they can’t change the layout. That means that other than in standard H&Ms, there is not one huge room which holds everything, but rather a lot of smaller rooms.

The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) was definitely worth visiting, when I was there they a contemporary art exhibition going on in all parts of the museum, for example oversized plastic skulls in a room full of medieval portraits, I found it quite interesting. I was also really surprised to find that there was a part of the museum reserved for the Viennese Secession.

On Good Friday, Mitch and I attended a “Free Pancakes in the Park” event, organised by the “Christian Backpackers Meetup Melbourne” and promoted on Couchsurfing. The attendees were all super lovely, one girl with an incredible voice sang and played on her Ukulele for us as a background music.

For Easter Sunday, they had invited me to go to their church together, however I overslept and didn’t make it. In order to at least feel a bit of my “normal” Easter spirit, I had bought some Lindt bunnies two days before, giving one to everybody I met that day:

I met up with a lot of couchsurfers the whole time in Melbourne, we always had a great time enjoying the good weather paired with either coffee or beer, depending on what time we met up.^^

One day, I went to the ACMI, the Australian Centre of the Moving Image. It was a lot bigger than I thought and included information about the history of the internet, video games and VR. They also showed a controversial movie that was about 50 minutes long called Terror Nullius, a worldplay on the whole issue of Terra Nullius (“unclaimed land”) and the way the Aboriginal people were treated by the first settlers. It was a bizarre audio-visual collage from Australian film & television history, which means that as a foreigner, the film probably had a different effect on me as opposed to people who recognise the clips shown. The film presented itself as a “retelling of Australia’s history”, while focussing on quite a few controversial topics that came up over the years, notably refugee policy and homosexuality.

To get to know the city better, I did a 2.5h Walking Tour around town with a pretty fun guide. He showed us loads of interesting graffiti/murals/whatever, as well as Melbourne’s older buildings.

What I found quite nice as well was the Botanic Gardens, however compared to the ones in Wollongong, it just wasn’t as impressive. Still, it was really nice walking around there and chilling on the grass, watching birds walking up to me and then getting scared and flying off.

Mitch showed me lots of really sweet cafes (all a tiiiny little bit hipster) and restaurants (for example a great & cheap curry place), as well as a rooftop bar in the middle of Melbourne.

Before leaving for New Zealand, I did a tour of the Great Ocean Road, which deserves its own post; I just have to say it was amazing.

After getting back to Melbourne after those 2 days, I went out with Nick, a German couchsurfer whom I had met a few days prior. The next morning, I had to get up stupidly early to get to the airport and had an amazing Mango-Coconut-Smoothie bowl with lots of nuts on top for breakfast.