Instead of flying directly to Melbourne like we were supposed to, we got rescheduled via Sydney. We therefore reach Melbourne in the early evening and get to the bed and breakfast we booked in South Yarra, an area just south of the city’s central district. Melbourne claims to be the cultural capital of Australia, and we’ll soon find out about it! In the morning we get to the heart of town, at Federation square. This is an impressive sight, so much going on there! Busses, artists, bars, open air exibitions, museums, huge plasma screens, lights and messages of all sorts coming right at you. It’s just a great first impression of this modern and exciting city. No matter where you walk, in the middle of downtown, along the river, crossing the bridge, in China town, all expressions of arts are showing, from the chairs to the statues, to the street signs.

The downtown is easy to walk through, and feels very comfortable yet very busy. The rest of town is reachable by tram or metro.

A few steps along the main artery of town and you can sit at the Italian cafe (serves real cannoli with ricotta), move to the right and you are in Vietnam, to the left and it’s France. Then it’s the market, with normal and organic fruits, then it’s the ballet, the opera house. Follow the metal figures along the bridge and it’s time for the entertainment (more?!) center, luxury boutiques, oyster bars, all the way to the museum of contemporary art which hosts temporary exhibitions of whoever artists (if you go on a Monday it’s closed…and it’s written in the guide book). On the second attempt to see the exhibition “we are all flesh” we actually find the museum open and we jump in with way too high expectations. The expo consists of 3 rooms: a large room with 2 cadavers hanging from the ceiling, both parts of horses and cows stitched back together in different configurations, the second with some fake intestines of cow (resembling wood), the third one with horns inside some frames. Sure there must be more to see? We walk around and around, but find only the toilets…so that was it…well…been there done that! I guess there has to be space for everybody’s expressions.

We are much better off to the beautiful National Gallery of Victoria, with some amazing aboriginal paintings. The museum building itself is stunning, as well as the surroundings.

For dinner we choose the Dumpling house, thinking the cheap portions might be small we order about everything, but when the plates arrive they are huge, probably for about 4-6 people…good we have walked a lot! We just have some extra time to walk along our neighborhood of South Yarra, which is unexpectedly full of bars and shops. We are even close to the local cinema, so we get tickets for the Snow White showing later.

I love this city, it has a soul like very few big and new cities have. Just outside town there are also nice beaches, but at this time of the year it’s not so warm, so we are heading far north to Cairns, in the middle of the tropics for some sun and beach time. I guess it’s really not easy to get an idea of how huge Australia is, but the flight to the north is about 3 hours. The area of Australia is more than the whole of Europe (not counting Russia), but the population is just 22 millions.