Marvelous Melbourne!

We started the day at Café Norra – drinking our flat white with Italian opera playing. We walked to the center of the city and caught the Melbourne Explorer bus- the big red, hop-on-hop-off tour bus for a quick city overview. We made a stop at the Immigration Museum, located in the old Customs House. The displays had replicas of ocean liner cabins to give you a sense of shipboard life for immigrants of different periods.

We had lunch at the Kimchi Café- and with garlic reeking from our pores, took the tram to the Visitors Center to plan our trip to Tasmania. With reservations made, we took a brief tour of the Melbourne Gaol. The Gaol is Victoria’s first prison and one of the oldest surviving buildings in Melbourne. Well known as the place where Ned Kelly was hung in 1880, it also has an interesting history of prison life in the 1800’s. Prisoners were kept in solitary confinement, forbidden to talk and forced to wear silence masks. Death masks were made of the executed prisoners and these masks were used for scientific analysis – trying to better understand criminal behavior. Since we were late, they gave us a return pass for their Saturday show on the last days of Ned Kelly.

Notes on Melbourne: The Aussie accent seems much stronger to us. The city has a much more relaxed pace than Sydney. The architecture is a blend of Victorian and modern. And the flies—this was our first, but not last introduction to the infamous Australian fly…more later.

Melbourne also has a strange traffic pattern- If you are driving in central Melbourne and want to turn against the traffic, you don’t get in the middle lane, but rather pull over to the curb- as far as possible from where you want to be- and sit there until the light changes- and make your turn from there- as quickly as you can before the light changes.
Dinner was some Turkish bread, wine and cheese in our room.