Melbourne

2 days in Melbourne

I've never been one to dwell on the history of a place, but I think it's quite important to note that Melbourne was founded by a man named Batman and originally bore the name Batmania.

I arrived at the central station around 7AM and crossed town to make it to the early morning Easter Mass at the massive St. Patrick's cathedral; this was probably a mistake as the immensity of the place precluded any chance of the 10-15 early risers in attendance of filling the place with the joyful noise you come to expect on this holiday. After this, I headed to the Queen Victoria flea market, which was the largest in the southern hemisphere and approached the scale of the San Jose behemoth; it was missing the churros (though they did have sugared corn) and the merchandise was of far too high a quality for my taste, I did manage to find a toboggan for a buck that would save doubtlessly save my life in the near future when I walked for hours in the arctic night of the southland. Not forgetting the all-important pagan traditions of the day, I dropped in on an ongoing egg hunt at my hostel; in general, the eggs were poorly placed – either they were foil-wrapped puddles in sun-laden window sills or were wedged behind toilets – neither scenario was all-together appetizing.

The city has a wide variety of art museums and I breezed through the two largest; among the more intriguing exhibits were an as assortment of twigs and leaves in a seemingly random assortment (but which surely had some profound deeper meaning distinguishing it from the natural leaf-falling phenomenon), along with a disembodied cybernetic arm. My personal favourite was a Japanese work called “Catfish Envy," in which one man had a catfish, and another wished that he too was fortunate enough to have a catfish. There was one particularly cruel exhibit where a few dozen chairs had been lined up in a gallery; the attendant watched me like a hawk, ensuring that despite my fatigue from walking all morning, I couldn't sit in any of them.

The massive Botanic Gardens allow the Melbournians to escape the drudgery of city life and stroll through a rainforest or collapse on the grass in the sunlight, and right up the road from that was a casino where you could sit inside for 24 hours a day and forget that there was such as sunlight – it rivalled Vegas, with enough fireballs, waterfalls, and giant Looney Tunes characters to make just about anyone want to senselessly throw away all their money.

In my ongoing quest for Ethiopian food, I had discovered that this was the only city on the continent with documented African restaurants. The first stop was the neighbourhood of Fitzroy which offered a diverse mix of drug-related shops and ethnic restaurants. I stopped at a place with a menu promising kitfa, gomen and other East African specialties, but to my great dismay, the meal was served not on a wicker plate with a generous layering of injera, but on a normal ceramic dish with a pitiful side of an injera-substitute made of regular, tasteless flour rather than the flavorful tef; and the greatest atrocity of all – the meal was accompanied by silverware. I left in disgust (naturally, after I have devoured every last piece of the bland impostor of a dish). Never have I felt so homesick as I did at this moment (though admittedly it was a longing for a dish pioneered halfway across the world, and to my knowledge, not severed within 600 miles of my home); I feared I would never find a legitimate substitute for my favourite cuisine (nor my second favourite since all the Mexican restaurants are run by Chinese, and for all their cooking merits, they don't know the first thing about rolling a burrito).

That night I tried to figure out how I could experience the world-famous Comedy Festival; the trouble was that on any given night, about 50 acts took the stage in venues around town and there seemed to be no means of deciding which was more worthwhile than any other. It wasn't possible to just jump from show to show since they all cost non-trivial amounts of money, so I picked one at random – the Edinburgh Comedy Festival (it was only after I bought the tickets for this that I realized R2D2 was giving a stand-up performance across the road, and thus the opportunity to hear the comedic stylings of everyone's favourite midget in a rubbish bin was lost forever). The festival consisted of an Aussie, a Welsh guy and a Londoner; in a refreshing change of pace, they decided to exclusively pick on Australians and didn't even mention the country everyone loves to hate. The Welsh guy made an odd selection of material as he talked for half an hour about the challenges and rewards of being a stalker, and the headliner just kept doing the same impression all night (it's remarkable how all the world's famous people sound remarkably like a drunken redneck).

The next day I went to the “Exploratorium" which I gathered may have been geared towards kids from the “Land of Giant Kitchen Appliances" exhibit, but it did have a free speed-pitch and a chance to do a 20m race against an Olympic sprinter (it was a little depressing to see that I wasn't one of the fastest people on earth, and even more so to watch a six-year old beat my time). As a mid-morning snack I downed a Turkish “pizza" that consisted only of bread and a thick layer of thyme; normally I would have had a problem with this affront to pizzas everywhere, but after the previous night's debacle, I was unusually accepting.

After a few hours in the sailors' settlement of Williamstown, which offered a Timeball station, a building shaped like the titanic, and a whole lot of boats. I grabbed the northbound train to Footscray. This community was 40% native Australians and 60% everything under the sun. The streets were lined with Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai, and African shops. One block had 5 Ethiopian restaurants in a row; I decided I would give this country one more chance. I stopped into the “African Café" (with a name like that, you know it's authentic!) and was served a huge helping of five traditional dishes on top of a massive sheet of the beloved floppy bread – and not a fork in sight. Next door was the “Injera Bakery" where I could order endless supplies of the tasty bread; apparently Tef, a grain grown exclusively in East Africa and remote parts of Idaho, is “a bugger to import," but the baker managed an excellent imitation with wheat and sorghum. The neighbourhood was also home ot myriad cheap goods; one department store featured a lady who would constantly scream spontaneous deals over a microphone, and the crowds would instantly rush to the location given; I picked up a fresh pair of underwear for the second half of my trip.

The next destination was the Melbourne Museum, which included a ton of unusually cool exhibits including live, free-roaming bugs, a 3-D theatre, and an extensive collection of soft porn (somehow, giving high school guys free admission to a museum where the walls are lined with life-size photos of naked women just seems like a bad idea).

I had just enough time to rush down to the beach town of St. Kilda where you could stroll the esplanade, grab a rollercoaster ride in Luna Park, or munch on Nepalese Sherpa food, and then I was off to catch my flight. For some reason, the whole town seemed intent on getting me to pay the $13 to take the “AirShuttle." The airport was clearly in range of the cheap public transport, but all pretended as if the notion of getting there by tram, train or bus was utterly ridiculous. Stopping a train with the marquee “Airport," the conductor gave me the rather implausible line that he didn't go anywhere near the airport – there was apparently a neighbourhood of the same name. They were clearly all getting cuts from the shuttle service – in the end, I shelled out the money and was whisked on to catch my 10PM flight to Hobart.