– APRIL 04-06, 2015

The City of Melbourne has some cool things to experience as you wander the streets.  First, there are scattered alleyways with some amazing graffiti.  See below…its great that the city has encouraged these works of modern art.

There are some great examples of architectural styles throughout Melbourne as well.  The image below has a heritage designated building covered within a large glass dome.  This is in the middle of a shopping mall complex, which had many people looking up to see what was going on.  The public stopping to look is one way to gauge architectural success.

Some wacky architectural facades as well…

 

 

A cool shot of the waterway…

 

 

 

The main light rail station.

 

 

Jill searched out some cool interior pics as well…

 

St Cathedral’s cathedral was closed for Good Friday services, but the exterior was quite impressive.

Federation Square includes some museum-style buildings with some interesting stuff to check out.

Across the street from Federation Square is St Paul’s Cathedral.  This church we were able to enter.  It was typical, but still a nice building.

 

 

The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) contains “modern art”….sometimes its hard to believe people pay for this stuff.

 

 

There is a huge cemetery close to the downtown core, so we had to check it out.  Some graves are in great shape, but others look to be in pretty rough shape.

 

 

 

The Melbourne Museum has sections dedicated to the animal/human development throughout the world’s history.

 

We went to a place in Melbourne that won the award of “Best Pizza in Australia” in 2014.  We had a veggie pizza for Jill and a prosciutto & salami for myself.  A glass of vino topped it off.

On Good Friday there was a protest for civil rights beside Federation Square.  We had to check this out, as the protesters spoke out against the closure of remote indigenous communities.  The people in these remote communities are very few and it costs a lot of money to support these people.  The Australian government has proposed stopping the programs that spend millions of dollars bring spent and this has upset a sizeable portion of the population.  However, an equally large amount of people showed up to protest back….but somehow they started a debate on Islam.  The police showed up and did a nice job to keep the peace.  It was something to see.

The next big activity for us is partaking in the multi-day hike called the “Great Ocean Walk” to see the Twelve Apostles rock formations.  Our good friend from Christchurch, Lyn, put us into contact with her friends Diana and Michael Tait in Geelong.  Geelong is a one hour train ride on the way to the Great Ocean Walk starting point, so this was a perfect location to stop over for a night.

Diana and Michael were excellent hosts and great people to spend time with.  Thank you so much…they not only took care of us before we started the hike and again for the night after the hike ended.  They have a beautiful home and we felt like we were back home for the night ourselves.

 

 

Now we hit the Great Ocean Walk next…it wouldn’t have been possible without Diana and Michael’s hospitality.  Thank you so much!

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For more photos of our adventure go to our flickr account here.