Despite the weather forcast being rain, today started out fine, and bloody hot when the sun hit you. I've found my new favourite building, especially since it has a view port in the floor. I'll definitely be trying to get up there.
I've just noticed it looks like a pane of glass is missing, maybe I'll skip it this time.
We headed off to a nearby diner as recommended to us, the same as dinner last night and Erect Hanks (or something similar).
Sorry Thomas, your recommendations aren't really hitting home this time. We tried out Coital Diner (or was it Control Diner?) The coffee was a bit weird, the service was very slow and although not the fault of the diner, we happened to be seated next to the noisiest woman I've ever heard since I left E&H, and when they thankfully buggered off another group arrived who had two of the loudest guys I've heard. I had to shout to the server so he could hear my order. Wankers.
Louie's pancakes eventually arrived and it was clear it had been sitting a while with all the butter melted out, and the mystery black fruity ooze soaked in. Apparently they don't really understand the meaning of "stack", since a double stack here means two pancakes. No.
This strange object is what I ended up with, after expecting a sort of a bit of everything breakfast. It was okay, but not a great fan of surprise tomato type sauce on my breakfast.
A few times now we have had food with paper underneath it, and I'm not sure why. I just end up tearing the damn stuff with my knife and have to pick bits of it out of my mouth. Classy. I have made sure to smear the plate afterwards to force them to wash it.
After breakfast we were off to the Melbourne Museum, a 10 minute walk through some gardens in the warm Melbourne sunshine.
It seems Australia still has their fair share of fucknuckles. These two geniuses were taking turns at grinding something and showering each other with sparks. Orange boy got a full head of sparks just before I took this, but sadly I didn't capture any flaming hair.
So the walk in the sunshine didn't last long, and ended with a mad dash under a massive oak tree to shelter from the rain.
And then it cleared up again.
And then it rained again. This is not the Melbourne Museum, but the exhibition centre opposite it. The museum is a pretty ordinary looking building so I didn't bother to photo it.
I think they've skimped on the high quality taxidermists, jumped the medium quality ones, avoided the cheap ones and got Bruce from the maintenance department to give it a go.
A nation of convicts still, they've stolen another New Zealand icon, Phar Lap. Luckily NZ doesnt go cheap on the stuffing so it doesn't look like a gormless donkey.
Pretty much the most badass, Metal dinosaur ever. They did miss a chance to have Iron Maiden playing to complete the piece.
A lot of the museum is very much form over function. It looks amazing, the areas are very attractive and well made but it was so hard to work your way around in any sense. A lot of the info was behind QR codes as well, which defeats the purpose of actually going to the museum. You don't go to a museum to look at your phone. Te Papa absolutely blows this out of the water.
SSpeaking of which, here's some water. They have a rain forest part and you go under the ponds. The setting was very genuine but we couldn't tell if they had sprinklers going or it was just after another downpour.
I raced past this bit, some pretty haunting and pissed off Aborigines were judging me.
Oh look, the Australians learned how to make a place after New Zealand, Brazil and the US got there first.
Next stop was lunch at a Brazilian cafe, so timing our escape between rain storms we legged it through Carlton. I was kind of thinking of wearing my new AFL shirt today but very very glad I didn't since it was for the Essenden Bombers and I didn't fancy having bottles and bricks thrown at me.
Bossa Nova, now the recipient of one of the lowest scores I've given a place. Yeah, it wasn't great. New Zealand level of service, it was that bad.
This monstrosity cost $30ish and was supposed to be chicken stroganoff. If the sauce looks a little watery, that's because whoever made it is a talentless hack. They seem to think rinsing out a can of tomato soup with leftover dishwater and tipping it onto some overcooked chicken counts. Luckily the rice was so overcooked and dehydrated it soaked up a fair bit of the manky fluid.
Next destination was the ACMI, a museum of film, TV and video games. Absolutely well worth the price of admittance. Which was free, but it was bloody good anyway.
Now this, this is a cool way of including technology in making museum information accessible and practical.
At the start you are given a disc and on each exhibit there is a circle symbol. If you want to get a copy of that information you tap the disk on a symbol and it adds it to your collection. Later on you can log into the ACMI website and access all the saved items.
Loads of really great exhibits and demonstrations of vintage movie making. Luckily there wasn't a lot of things I remembered from my childhood in the "ancient past" category, but there were one or too. Sigh.
The Piano. From the movie. Is there nothing these canary yellow wearing bounders won't steal from us?
Each of these slices played a 5ish second sound bite, the order according to cards placed along the timeline at the bottom. A genius way to demonstrate a video timeline and editing, plus annoy the tits off everyone when the same clip plays over and over.
That's going straight into the pool room.
I don't think this was from any particular movie but it was very well made so I included it. There were a number of exhibits themed after games or movies made by the developers who made them which really lifted the quality. Amazing the number of games especially made by Australian teams.
Sorry Melbourne, Sydney beats you hands down for the city Christmas tree.
We finally made it to one of the famous laneways (ironically not called a Lane), Degraves Street. Tables and chairs lined the middle of the street and open fronted cafes were on either side. This was what we were imagining and it absolutely delivered.
A massive bowl of coffee and an almond & pistachio pastry. So, so good. Apart from the paper, what the hell?
This was taken just after I startled some poor woman who stepped out of the elevator just as I was taking a photo. Her brief moment of paparazzi infamy was ended with my awkward apologies and shufling down a bit further to take this photo.
For some reason this intersection is the only one we have seen that has the foot tread plates light up red and green for the crossing lights. I wondered if the tally of slack jawed, mouth breathing, perpetually looking at a phone road kill got so high they needed to put the signs where they could see them.
After walking for a good while we headed back the way we came and ended up having dinner across the street from where we had the almond pastry. The smell of stale cooking grease should have been a huge red flag, but the Google ratings were high so we continued in. Yes, this is how grotty, tired and dingy it looked in real life.
What the actual fuck. In which world has picking bits of lettuce out of a bag and balance them on top of a stack of burned deep fried chicken bits been worth $36? I mean it wasn't worth it, but they damn well charged it.
Dirty pricks need to clean their air conditioner as well. Almost as bad as Fergs in Queenstown.
The cool looking but anything but Degraves Espresso.
We were going to head down another laneway opposite but this one gets locked and our feet hurt so much after almost 12 hours out and about. We jumped on a tram and minutes later we were back at the hotel. Still really liking Melbourne, kind of glad it's not all been amazing for a bit of a reality check but still having great fun.
Tomorrow it's supposed to be warmer (today has been 14c or so) and not raining so we might go through some gardens, the Art Gallery and markets.
