Melbourne leg of our Oz trip

We spent a few days with Leslie and Noella in Melbourne- Noella was a roommate of mine when she was studying cello performance at UM. She moved to Melbourne with her husband Leslie when he took a professor job at a university there- he is a Chem E too actually. We had such a good time there hanging out with them. Besides seeing some of Melbourne we hiked in some local mountains, and drove out to Phillip Island which is famous for the colony of Little Penguins that live there. They are so cute- you aren't allowed to take pictures of them unfortunately.

Melbourne is a different sort of city than Sydney- it's more industrial, and has more of a blue collar feel. Sydney seems very modern, very up-to-date, with high quality public transit, and a very clean look. Melbourne looks a bit older, and in fact reminded me in some ways of Pitsburgh, where Sydney was more like San Francisco. An interesting city all the same.

Melbourne from one of the many bridges over the Yarra River, which sort of bisects the city.

We saw lots of street artists- this guy was quite good.

Noella took us on some amazing trails- this is a eucalyptus rainforest. It was amazing.

On our way to the rainforest we stopped in a few quaint little towns and on a fence row we found a bunch of blackberry plants. So we started picking of course! It's a bit early in the season (you can see most of the berries aren't ripe).

Another place we went hiking- it was very dry here.

Eucalyptus trees are so interesting- they are non-deciduous, like pine trees, in that they don't lose their leaves every year. They have very thick, tough sort of leaves with a waxy coating. But their bark sort of peels off in big long pieces and falls off. I think it is a way of returning nutrients from the bark to the soil where they can be reprocessed and then absorbed by the tree in a way that it can use more effectively.

We stopped here at Cape Wollemai on the way to see the Little Penguins on Phillip Island.

George and Noella a few steps ahead of me on the beach.

There were these people fishing right on the beach- considering how high the surf was I don't know what was there to catch, but apparently something. :)

These are the little penguins! (courtesy of Pete and Barbara's Penguin Pages)

Little penguins are only 17 inches tall, and they are unique because they live in these sandy burrows that they dig into the sand dunes along the coast of Australia, at Phillip Island. There are about 1500 that live there, and they congregate on the beach after sunset and run fast across the beach (they're most vulnerable on the beach) as fast as their little legs can carry them, and then they walk to their burrows! Sometimes they have to walk over a mile! They are so cute. Definitely recommend seeing them if you can.

G drinking his very first "I cut open this coconut myself" coconut juice. :)

We saw these cool Moon Jellies at the aquarium in Melbourne- the aquarium was unfortunately very small and overpriced. I don't recommend it unless you get some sort of discount.

And this strange giant jellyfish.

We also saw these great white sharks at the aquarium- they're just babies really, but still scary looking.

The aquarium has a neat underwater walkway so you can see all the big sharks and things swimming around.

This looks like a pretty plain picture of G drinking tea right?

Well, this isn't tea, it's actually Weasel Coffee. Noella brought some back from Vietnam recently and in case you haven't heard the strange tale of Weasel coffee let me share it with you. So in Vietnam and Indonesia there's a creature called a Civet. It eats coffee berries, which are a bit like cherries- they're red and they have a pit (what we call a coffee bean.) The civets eat the best berries, and depending on the type of civet they either regurgitate the pits or they poop them out. Either way, people in villages collect these pits, and they are then sanitized and made into coffee beans the way we know them. Yum. Anyway given the opportunity to try some of this stuff we just couldn't resist. It tasted like plain old coffee to me but I'm not a coffee drinker.

Melbourne has some interesting graffitti, and some very talented graffiti artists.

We flew from Melbourne back to Sydney and the approach way flew right over the Opera House!

We decided to fly from Melbourne the same day as our flight from Sydney back to the US was leaving. The Melbourne flight was early in the day, and the San Francisco flight was at around 4. Unfortunately Virgin Blue canceled the flight we were scheduled to take from Melbourne to Sydney, and put us on it's later flight, which made it too close a call for us to get to the San Fran flight. So we had this interesting and exciting airport shuffle- first we checked our bags in with Virgin Blue, then the woman told us to go to the United counter and see if they could get us on one of their flights to Sydney so we wouldn't miss ours. So off we went, and they said they could do that, but needed all of our luggage. So we went back, had to go down to a special door while the Virgin Blue counter rep went and found our luggage. Then we took it to the United counter, who told us that actually since our flight to Sydney wasn't with United technically they wouldn't get paid for that leg. To which we responded that had we been told that the first time we wouldn't have had to go dig our bags out and everything else. They finally let us take the United flight, and we were then flagged by the computer for a random luggage search. Mind you we were cutting it close already. After that we hurried off to the gate area, and tried to get some food before we went through the security AGAIN. But the woman didn't know how to work a credit card machine. Finally we had to cancel our order, hurry through security, and then as we were checking in we got selected for ANOTHER search. Finally we made it to the plane. :)

Obviously we got back to Detroit just fine. :) But by the time we made it back to London I was starting to feel like a well seasoned cast iron skillet- I felt like we'd been put through the fire and cooked so well that I feel just as at home in an airport as in my own bed. :)