Vania and Tom around the world: Melbourne (Australia)

Australia - welcome to the country with the most bizarre licencing laws on the planet. For a start, alcohol is only sold through "bottleshops." OK, maybe not that weird in itself, although these places are like labyrinths and finding what you want can be tricky. Some are even in the entrance to a pub, so you can buy a bottle of wine in the bottle shop, then take it in and pay corkage to open it. But you can't do this with beer, obviously! A sort of 'bring your own alcohol' pub. They also have drive-thru bottle shops, sounds like a good idea to me! Weird. Anyway, we had reached Melbourne and I experienced another cultural highlight of our time in Australia - the sports bar / betting shop combo. These places are great, you can watch sport, drink beer and gamble all in one place! With a busy day's football viewing ahead of me, I went to watch both a Watford game and the Australian A-League grudge match between Melbourne and Sydney. Football is getting increasingly popular in Australia, but I was disappointed to find hardly anyone on the Melbourne bar watching the game. In case you care, it ended a 2-2 draw meaning Sydney qualify for the finals and Melbourne don't. The few punters actually watching the game didn't look happy, to the extent I wondered whether any furniture would fly at the final whistle (didn't hang around long enough to find out)!

We started off by staying in St. Kilda, a seaside suburb and general backpacker hangout. St Kilda is one of the most popular places to stay as it's by the beach and has a big old rickety theme park called Luna Park. Unfortunately our hostel was a bit of a dump (The Ritz for Backpackers - very funny). Plus the weather wasn't good. We did however manage to meet up with some friends Vania didn't even know were in Melbourne until a few weeks ago. On our first night there we got a crash tour of Melbourne and dinner in (the not so) Little Italy with Nicole, an australian Vania had met while travelling in Paris a while ago. They hadn't seen each other since so dinner was spent catching up and meeting Luca (Nicole and Luigi's five year old son). The following night we met up with Tina and Suran, friends from Vania's lab who just happened to have moved to Melbourne a couple of months ago. After a few drinks they took us to see the local penguin colony, just by the beach, in a pier. These were tiny penguins (pocket sized) but they still managed to leave Vania wanting one of them (sigh...). As if her wish list wasn't big enough, Vania then spotted something running in the dark and climbing up a tree, which upon closer inspection turned out to be a freaky-eyed possum. And yes, that's now on the list as well (double sigh...).

We then moved to central Melbourne, spending time walking around the centre, shopping for boomerangs and strolling along the Yarra river. We visited a comedy club (the comedy begun early when the address of the club was something like 125/1087 collins st and we got lost). Fortunately we still arrived on time - being english and a backpacker would have made me an all too easy target for abuse! We also went to several of the good restaurants on offer. Melbourne has large greek, italian, etc populations, so we enjoyed some great food and coffee (Vania's search for a good expresso finally ended). We managed to find some longed for moussaka and even had a much missed night in with friends when Suran and Tina invited us for a sri-lankan curry at theirs. Thanks Nicole, Tina and Suran for welcoming us and showing us around Melbourne.

Our final night in Melbourne was spent at the Australian Open tennis. I had booked tickets for the second Monday, and was very happy when the schedulers put on Djokovic vs Hewitt. The grounds were similar to Wimbledon, although smaller and a lot more blue. The match was good, although Hewitt was a bit tired following his game against Baghdatis which finished at 4.30 am two days earlier! It was good to see the eventual tournament winner Djokovic, who is very good at entertaining the crowds. And there were no more fights between the Serbian and Croatian fans which had brought out the capsicum spray (mmm, sounds quite nice) earlier in the cup.