A lot has changed in Melbourne since its early days as a gold-mining town on the very fringes of civilization. For one thing: its name. The original name of the city was supposed to be, get this, Batmania! It was supposed be named after its founder, John Batman, but the Aussies were trying to curry favor with the British crown at the time, so ended up naming it after Lord Melbourne instead. Which is how we missed out on having one of the greatest city names in history.
Melbourne feels like a global city now, but it still holds on to a little bit of that fringe element that makes it feel different. Alleyways filled with beautiful street art, trendy speakeasies, and odd street performers mix with delicious food options from all corners of the globe, stunning and strange museums, and cool modern architecture to create a flavor that is unique to this city.
We stayed at a hostel that was in an old converted nunnery (very cool buiding, but definitely one of the grosser hostels we stayed in) in the Fitzroy neighborhood, which is one of the trendiest neighborhoods in the city. It’s surrounded by hip bars, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, and clothes shops full of fashions that make you say “wait, people wear that?!” The park across the street from the hostel was a favorite evening roosting spot for huge fruit bats (these aren’t your piddly North American bats, we’re talking like a three foot wingspan), which would come winging in to land at dusk each night like miniature squeaking dragons. We had so much fun watching them!
We spent our days wandering around the city, exploring all the little alleyways and finding as much cheap food as we could. Food is nearly as expensive as alchohol in this city, so we couldn’t afford to explore much of the world-class dining options, but we found our fair share of cheep yummy street food!
We splurged and spent the $30 pp to enjoy the Melbourne Museum for a day. It was definitely worth it; there were some really unique exhibits, as well as the usual natural history section full of creepy stuffed animals.
We wanted to see some of the surrounding countryside while we were here, so started looking into how far out of the city public transportation could get us. We found a small national park called Organ Pipes which we could get to by taking a train and then a bus, so we decided to finally pop our “no city buses” cherry. We successfully navigated the train out of the city, then caught the correct bus with a lot of help from Google Maps. How did people survive before Google Maps? We were out of suburbia and humming along on a freeway surrounded by empty brown hills whena bus stop flashed by the side of the road. Crap, that’s our stop! We didn’t even know they had bus stops by the side of freeways! We got off on the next stop, also weirdly right on the freeway shoulder, and then started slogging back towards the park entrance. Weirdly, another girl had gotten off with us because she was also trying to get to the park, and had also missed the stop. She was a Melbourne local, originally from Malaysia, so we had fun chatting with her as we walked.
We had decided to spend New Years in Melbourne rather than Sydney because it was supposedly cheaper and more low-key. On New Year’s Eve we hit up a few bars in Fitzroy for some obscenely-priced beers, then headed to one of the many sites where they would be setting fireworks off in the center of town. We copied the locals and laid out a blanket, sneaking forbidden booze into cups as we waited for the fireworks to begin.
On our last afternoon in the city, we were wandering around the massive Royal Botanical Gardens when we saw a popup Globe Theater. They were advertising Much Ado About Nothing for that evening, and the tickets for the standing room “seats” were only $10, so we got tickets for that evening’s performance. Justin wasn’t so sure about the idea, but we got dressed up in our least grungy hiking pants and made our way back to the theater that night. We were both pleasantly surprised, as the performance was awesome! We laughed so hard our sides hurt, the actors were great at bringing out the comedy in Shakespeare’s writing.
