We leave St. Kilda and travel into CBD. That is The Central Business District and is a good place to base yourself as it is in the centre of the city. More importantly we are inside the circle where the trams are free.

They use the old trams which are slower, noisier and more nostalgic. Maggie booked our accommodation on Airbnb and we are on the 19tg floor of a modern apartment building that seems to house mostly Chinese. In fact this area seems full of Chinese, Vietnamese and Koreans. All the food outlets are either fast food or Asian.
We learn later the Chinese live here as the university is nearby and it has a large number of Asian students. We arrive before we drop of the car so we get parking for a couple of hours. Here cars go up in a lift to the correct floor and your designated parking space.
It is different to be staying so high up and at night it is a different world.

You are somehow connected yet apart from all the other windows in the skycrapers near. You can see into their apartments and they can presumably do the same to you. Must be a good place for voyeurism. All the apartments on the upper floors are divorced from the world taking place at ground level. OK for a few nights but would want to live in the clouds.

At night there is even more if a connection as their is no daylight interfering with the pathways into each other’s lives.

 

Opposite our building at ground level are two basketball courts and it for me makes it seem like New York.

We take the free tram ? round for a tour and it is a good move as the commentary is interesting. Apparantly, Melbourne is quite cosmopolitan housing the second largest Greek community outside Greece ?? and the second largest Italian community outside Italy ??. The town was built on Gold after it became a Mecca for the gold rush of the 1850’s.

We get off at Federation Square a modern metropolis that is a tourist Mecca and full of young school parties that seem to be going the the Museum of the televisual Arts ? We have a look and get to revisit ‘Mad Max’ and ‘Prisoner on Cell block H’ we do a ‘bullet time’ animation like ‘The Matrix’ which must the from a studio over here I presume.

Maggie finally gets onto the big screen.

Melbourne is just too big a city to digest. 4,500,000 people and two days in it. The streets have 2 or 3 lanes and the traffic is fast and busy and wants to get where they want to be. Not really conducive to chilling out and you probably need to put your head in a different place to really get more from it. The city is largely new in nature and it feels that the old buildings are gradually getting squeezed out.

I think we are too much in slow down mode to enjoy it. Good thing is in the CBD you are enclosed in one small area and that is more manageable. Pity the area wasn’t more pretty and not only convenient for being in the city centre. It’s fast food, shopping malls and Asian students.
Later for us it’s back on the tram and back to homebase and our world in the sky.
That night we take a dander and grab some food until Maggie gets tired with sore feet.
On getting her home her feet have stopped working and she can hardly walk. Concerning but Mabey a good nights rest will sort things out.