20170116: Exploring Melbourne

Monday January 16, 2017 Exploring Melbourne

We had no trouble getting to sleep and waking after sunrise. The sun rises around 6:00am and sets at 8:45pm, so its like mid summer at home. Kind of nice to have such long days again.

Continental breakfast at the City Limits Hotel consists of cereal boxes (Special K and Just Right), 2 pieces of white bread and 2 pieces of rye bread for toast, butter, various jams and a serving of Vegemite, milk, coffee, tea, and orange juice. There is a toaster and teapot under the sink and just enough plates, cups and silverware to get the job done. 

They do require that you wash and put away your own dishes, but don't give you a drying rack, so we improvised with a hand towel and the serving tray. They do give you dish washing detergent and a clean sponge.

Vegemite on rye toast is actually pretty good, once you get used to the new taste and spread it very thin. I've been working up to this trip with a small bottle of Marmite at home. Anyone who grew up in the 80's remembers that song by Men at Work where they sing about hitching a ride with someone in the outback in beat up VW minibus and eating a Vegemite sandwich. We're living the dream.

We were the first in line to take a tour of the Parliament Building. The chambers of Parliament were ornate and once had skylights in the domed ceilings. However, that proved to be too hot, so they constructed a roof over the domed ceilings to make it more comfortable. We saw the chair where the Queen of England sat when she visited to open Parliament. 

Then we walked around some of the gardens and nearby cathedral. The Circle tour tram didn't start running until noon, and we had finished the Parliament tour by 10am, so we took the regular free trams to Federation Square. That's a large plaza with arts venues, and the Museum of Australia. It is on the southern border of the free tram ride zone. From there we walked 2 miles south though mostly park grounds where some huge Mardi Gras like Melbourne city celebration had wrapped up the day before, and workers were busily cleaning up the mess and taking down hundreds of Easy-Up awnings and miles of wiring.

Our destination was the Royal Botanical Gardens, which is a huge complex with as nice a collection of plants, walking trails, exhibits and ponds as you can imagine. If you could cross the plant variety of Buchart Gardens, the scope of Stanley Park or Central Park, and throw in some of the Smithsonian, you'd still fall short.

We spent nearly 3 hours walking through the gardens in glorious perfect weather with no crowds, and lots of relaxing views and tranquility. And best of all, it was free! Walking back north, we took a detour west along the south bank of the Yarra river which forms the southern border of downtown Melbourne, to walk through the lobby and gift shop of the National Gallery of Victoria, which contains a collection of master works. This museum wasn't free, and we were pretty much walked out from the Royal Botanical Gardens, so we just enjoyed use of their bathrooms and air conditioning for a bit before walking through the gentrified retail shopping district that the Southbank of the Yarra River has become. We crossed a pedestrian bridge back over the Yarra river and hopped back on a free tram to Chinatown for lunch.

One of the things Melbourne's Chinatown is renowned for is its dumpling shops, and one of the most highly Yelp ranked ones is just a block and a half south of our hotel. You can watch workers making the dumplings in a window at the front of the Shanghai Street restaurant, and usually there is a huge line out the door and up the sidewalk. They serve from 10am to 3pm, and from 5pm to 9pm. We arrived at 2pm, and there was nobody standing in line. The hostess made sure we knew that the restaurant closed at 3pm, and that we'd have to place our orders right away and be done by 3pm, and we were good with that. We ordered 4 different types of dumplings. Their signature item is the pork Xiao Long Bao, which our sons John and Price have told us are also known as "soup dumplings". They are the holy grail of dumplings in China town. When you pop one in your mouth and bite into it, you are greeted with a gush of yummy soup broth, followed by the delicious filling and perfectly textured shell. They are hard to get right. 

We also ordered a chicken and prawn variant, a fried pork mini-bun variant, and wontons in Thai inspired sauce. Everything was delicious, living up to their Yelp raves, and we ended up taking leftovers to our hotel room. They give you fancy plastic containers for take out like disposable Tupperware, but charge you $0.50 each for them. When we first arrived we asked if they accepted VISA credit cards and they said yes, with a $20 AUD minimum and 3% surcharge for credit. We have found this to be pretty much unavoidable in Chinatown if you want to use plastic. When it came time to check out, I handed my EMV chip and PIN equipped card to the cashier. She ran it through her terminal, but handed the card back saying that she couldn't accept it because the card required a signature, instead of a PIN. She couldn't figure out how to get the terminal to switch to PIN mode. Unfortunately, we didn't have cash, and my other credit card wasn't PIN enabled either. Then she asked if we had a card with tap to pay. Fortunately, I was wearing my Apple Watch, which has tap to pay via ApplePay. So even though I had set up Apple Pay with the exact same credit card she was unable to process with her terminal, the transaction went through when I tapped my Apple Watch on the terminal. We were saved from having to do dishes or scrub the restaurant floors by my Apple Watch.

After dropping off the leftovers in our hotel refrigerator, we hopped back on the free trams back to Federation Square and did a quick tour of the Museum of Australia. There were lots of works by Australian artists from all the various eras of the arts. It was funny to walk into a gallery and say, "Wow, that looks like they have a collection of John Singer Sargent, but the information plaques show it is Australian artist of the same era who painted them. Then you walk into another gallery and say "wow, that looks kind of like a Klimt", but see it's an Australian artist of the same era. It was the same for the cubists and impressionists. They did have some very unique works that were of aboriginal sources, and these were the most interesting objects that we found. The museum closed at 5pm, so we really did just speed our way through the galleries and out the door with the guards at our heels.

As we looked for where to board our tram, Janet noticed what looked like a crowd headed up an alley across the street. She asked a local what was going on, and he explained that it is an alley filled with graffiti that has become quite an attraction, so we worked our way across the street and found a pretty amazing collection of tagging and urban art filling an entire alleyway, extending several stories up the sides of the buildings. 

It kind of put Seattle's Pioneer Square's bubble gum wall to shame. We then found where to board the Circle tour tram but it seemed to be late in arriving. The Circle tour trams stop running at 6pm, so we weren't sure if we'd missed the last one, so we boarded a regular tram that ran along the same route, completing the Circle tour without the narrative. We then switched to a regular tram to get us back to our hotel.

My Apple Watch said that we had logged 23,000 steps and nearly 9 miles today. I know that the recording from Federation Square to South bank was accurately recorded at 5.47 miles, but we figured I must have forgotten to stop recording a walking workout when we hopped a tram at some point in the day. Still, it made us feel like we did get a good workout. After resting a bit in the hotel, and finishing our leftover dumplings, we eventually walked to a Ramen shop just a half block down the street, and had some pretty decent Ramen. It wasn't quite as good as what I've had at the Kyoto Kitchen- a recently discovered Japanese restaurant in Mt. Vernon, but nearly so, and oh so close to our hotel. Our bellies full, we were ready for bed in a jiff. Tomorrow we have an all day excursion to see the Great Ocean Road.