Marvelous Melbourne

Sorry Sydney folks- but my vote goes to Melbourne! Though Federation Square might be the ugliest building I’ve ever seen, the rest of the city has a lot of beautiful architecture and the city, I thought, just has a better overall vibe to it. There’s more life. Melbournians (?) don’t go to bed early on a Saturday night.

Federation Square. Wretch.

Pretty architecture vs. hideous (Fed Square again)

Train Station

First night I headed out to a bar called Cookie, based on a recommendation from Luke and Kelly. A little unexpected- Thai food meets craft beer bar, but it was awesome! The place was packed on a Tuesday night and the food was fantastic. As was the beer selection. J I had the chili chicken. Twice. And paired it with Bridge Road's Beechworth (English Style) Pale Ale- quite nice! Unfortunately, because it was so busy, I didn’t get to geek out like I wanted to, so I just picked a beer and decided to revisit Cookie later in the week at an off time (who knew Tuesday night at 10:30pm wouldn’t be off??).

Next day we hit up another craft beer bar called Beer Deluxe for lunch (we were all about sleeping in as much as possible- very little happened in the mornings). Also a big fan of this place, though the food isn’t quite as impressive as Cookie (that’s definitely not to say it was bad though!). And guess what just happened to be going on there over the next two afternoons- a beer festival! Woot! Kind of thrilled to have stumbled on that, I bought tickets for the next day right away.

That night we split up and I headed out to the penguin parade. Every night just after dusk, thousands of penguins climb up this one beach to their nests. Literally thousands. I couldn’t miss that! And they were so cute! I kind of love penguins. I like how the wattle. From the viewpoint where I sat, we saw several hundred go by. They just kept coming! And then they’d hang out in front of our platform for a bit while the dried off and re-oiled (to keep waterproof). Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take pictures there, but here’s a link to an illegal video of them. Multiple this by a couple hundred or so.

Penguin Parade