Melbourne: bogans at footy, street art graffitti and french toast for brekkie

Melbourne was a good place to calm down after our Tasmania adventures; do the laundry, sleep long, have long breakfasts with french toast and enjoy real barbecues :) (No kangaroo-steak unfortunately ;) )

We stayed with our friend Nadine (from Hamburg), who lives together with two other girls. One of them, Bec, who owns the place, was kind enough to let us live there too!!! I guess we have been really lucky all the time when it comes to accommodation and friendships! So with good company and a roof above our heads, it was time to explore more Down Under Culture.

FOOTY: CATS, MAGPIES, HAWKS, LIONS, and EAGLES
"..from when the ball is bounced, to the final bell...STAND UP AND FIGHT LIKE HELL" - (Geelong Cats Club song)
Mike, Bec's fiance, is (like many others!!) totally into footy. No, not football/soccer like we know it in Europe. Footy. an art in itself. In Melbourne we're talking AFL, not rugby league or rugby union as they do on the West coast or further north. It seems to be quite complicated; it's all based on a similar game, but different. One does scrums, the other not as far as I remember. But make sure to not confuse them if you don't want to offend any of the fans. As if you'd compare an Toyota with a Maserati. It's both a car, but different. To me, it's more a comparison between Opel Omega and Holden Commodore. :) But the Australians are proud of the difference, so we'll just respect that :D. As we didn't get to see a real match, Mike talked us through a DVD of the Grand final 2011 of the Geelong Cats against the Collingwood Magpies. I'd like to think I'm an expert now, but in reality I got only a bit of it. The game is fast, it's hard to follow and actually the best are the comments of analysts. Bogans is now one of my favourite words :) Lovingly mocking a part of the Australian society. And we've seen many bogans, believe me.

DOWNTOWN: COFFEE, GRAFFITTI and BEACHES
Melbourne itself is mostly loved for it's cafes, with wonderful coffee and cakes. It has a nice atmosphere, a bit alternative with a relatively small centre for it's 4 million inhabitants. Some of the side streets are covered in graffitti. It's really cool and hundreds of weddings love it as a background for their photos.

And there's nothing like a city next to the beach. Melbourne has plenty. If it wouldn't be so hard to get to them, it would have been perfect. Melbourne's public transport is a bit nerve-wrecking, as the system is organised like a star with central/ Flinders station in the middle. If you live close to the airport, you might still need to travel an hour to central first, change to another line and then travel an hour out again. Then, you also need a prepaid card to touch-on, touch-off. Like in Holland: great for locals, shitty for tourists. Thanks to Mike, we had two cards we could borrow, so that made it a bit easier.

But back to the beach: St. Kilda was beautiful, it's where all the popular "dudes" go. A bit like LA beaches, with waving palms, big houses on the waterfront and loooots of people showing off their bikini's. There's penguins on the pier (we didn't get to see them unfortunaly) and hundreds of kitesurfers around (envious!). Renting our material "only" 300 !!! dollar per half a day. Sigh.

Another nice beach is Brighton, with lots of colorful beach houses, really pretty. From St. Kilda, we wanted to shortly pay a visit to it. If we hadn't taken the tram, but the train, we would have gotten there easily. After we waited 10 minutes for the tram, we heard there had been a tram accident :( and we decided to walk. We should have picked that up as a sign not to go there... We walked 25 minutes to the crossing with the other tram that would take us to East Brighton. Had our map on the phone still worked (or the tourist map been big enough), we would have seen that East Brighton is about 40 minutes walk to the beach houses. It started to rain.... After 45 minutes in the tram, it halts in nowhere, without any notice. Apparently this is the end station. We ask a few people how to get there; everyone seems to be more busy with themselves; getting home or somewhere else...it's simply not the place to ask for a lift. We just miss the bus. I decide to ask a lady who just gets into her car... "Oh I know, if you just go left and then right and then left, eh, oh no, right and keep going. Sorry it is just that I never walk there. It's not too far but it takes long walking...ah don't despair, you'll love it when you get there in the end." And with that she closes the door and drives off. We miss Tasmania. Seems as if the richer people get, the less flexible or helpful they are. By the time we finally get there, the sun is already going down and it is still raining. The beautiful pictures I had in mind will have to be made another time. We walk another 15 minutes and finally arrive at the train station.

SOME REFLECTIONS
It seems like a long story with little message apart from that it was a disaster to get there, but it's pretty typical of how we felt, and of how the culture struck us. Everyone here drives a car. No one bikes here and many people rather spend excessively much money on going to a gym, rather than doing your daily workout by cycling, walking, etc. And as for hospitality: for their friends and aqcuaintances, Aussies do anything. In general they are really warm and open. But to strangers, it is different, they'd rather just mind their own business. It made us really think about the Western world; it's probably the same back in Europe. And as long as you have money and friends (which might correlate :)) you'll be fine and Australia is a great place.

BANGKOK IN MELBOURNE?
A small detour on the way back took us to the Queen Victoria's Market by night. Nothing like a night market we've known in Asia. Hundreds and hundreds of students sitting outside, incredibly expensive food (10 dollar sausage) and almost no handicraft. A disappointment. Probably nice when you get there with your friends, but not as a tourist. The t-shirts they sell here are exactly the same as on Khaosan Road in Bangkok. Only 100 Bhat (3 dollar) is 30 here. In Asia we would have said : "No joking price! You give me real price, not tourist price!!"

RIDING INTO THE SUN
We did get to borrow Bec's and Karen's bikes, and cruised around the city a bit. It's nice to be independent of public transport! Its obliged to wear a helmet, and necessary as the cars really are not accustomed to bikes. From next to the waterside in one of the parks we watched people canoeing and feeding the birds. A cockatoo paid a visit and the world was perfect. The Easter-Christmas package from Jan's mother arrived and the tons of chocolate made us soon regain the weight we lost in Asia :)

We felt the warmth and kindness of our (new) friends, but somehow one week was "long". We started to grow a bit impatient to see more; we hired a car to drive into the Alps! More about that later! :))