Local brews and lots of walking

Eureka Tower - tallest building
in the Southern Emisphere

We both slept like logs all night: I guess being up for over 24 hours makes for a good night's sleep. We got up around 6:30 am and had a true Aussie breakfast: coffee and toast with Vegemite...and it was yummy! I knew I would like it. Dave like it too, which is strange, since he had it before and thought it tasted like "rotten roo entrails" to quote him. Apparently he had tried it straight out of the jar instead of with butter ... and you are supposed to spread it really, really thin.
We went to the Box Hill train station (Box Hill is the "burb" we are staying in) to catch the train to go downtown. In 30 minutes we were at the Visitor's Center starting to gather information on the city itself and also a few other places we'll hit as soon as we leave Melbourne on Friday.

After that first pit stop, the walking began: we started wondering around the city and the first stop ended up being the Koorie Heritage Cultural Center. The Koories are one of the Aboriginal tribes from this area and this center helps preserve their culture, language and traditions. It was really, really interesting. After that, we continued with our city-wondering: we must have walked 10 miles today.



The Little Creatures brewery

We stopped for lunch at the "Little Creatures" brewery where we sampled the local brews and shared a pizza with pumpkin, goat cheese and Moroccan spices: I know it sounds weird but it was pretty tasty. I can't say I'm a really big fan of pumpkin on pizza, but it was worth trying it. The beer was delicious. And then jet-leg hit us like a ton of bricks: at around 3 pm we were both walking around zombie-like and seriously entertaining the idea of laying on the grass in Fitzroy park and take a nap.
We decided it wasn't worth risking getting arrested on our first day, so we went on and hopped on the free tram that goes around center city to let the tram carry our tired bodies around for a bit.

We got off and took a final stroll in the Southern promenade before going back to the train station to go back home. We decided to have dinner nearby Steve's house because we knew after that there was no way we would be up for long. There is a pretty large Asian community in this area, so we dined at Steve's favorite restaurant "The dumpling king": and yes, of course we had dumplings.

Melbourne from the Yarra river

We finally got home at around 8:30 and packed for the trip up North: tomorrow we leave for Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef. We will spend 1/2 day in the city again, then we'll make our way to the airport. No computer, so it will be a couple days before I post again.