South Melbourne

Today was a touristy city day as I basically covered the southern half of Melbourne as best I could in the beautiful weather. The wayMelbourne works is that the main downtown core is located just north of Yarra River and so I crossed over to the other side of the river today and saw all the major sights. The main thing I saw was the Olympic village from the 1956 games. They've definitely redone most of the buildings but it still very much has the sports feel to it and it's interesting beacuse they've added a couple more massive sporting venues next door so there basically is a huges sports area of the city where the Olympic village was. About 4 main arenas are next to each other and the Australian Open is played in one of them when it is in full swing.

I was also able to go through the Royal Botanical Gardens which had some interesting parts to it and was a mix of plants from all around the world. They had a few neat ponds and I got to visit another "Long Island" which was situated in the biggest pond in the park.

The rest of the day was just wandering around and at the end of the day I got to catch some live Jazz since the annual Jazz festival is in town this week and they have performances each night in the main Federation square. The square is set up brilliantly with a slight incline and they set a stage up at the bottom so whenever large events are in town people just have a seat in the square and it's converted into a mini ampitheatre.... sort of. I then finally got around to trying the Australian specialty of meat pies tonight. I wasn't quite sure what was "Australian" food until recently when I kept seeing meat pies sold everywhere, they're basically a flaky crust with steak filling and I got the works ontop of it which was a lump of mashed potatoes and mashed peas with gravy poured overtop. Absolutely amazing!!!! Another food I've gotten a little too attatched to down here are Tim Tam's which are little chocoalate wafers with icing in the middle and then coated with milk chocolate. In Airlie Beach especially everyone was eating them and I got a pack yesterday and made the mistake of finishing a whole pack by the evening in which case I wasn't feeling too special this morning.

Tomorrow I'm hitting up the Northern part of Melbourne and then Wednesday I get my car to do the Great Ocean Drive, getting super excited for that!