
Thought 1 - at the moment moving to Melbourne for the weather would only be appropriate if you were a big fan of driving rain and minor flooding. After a nice day on Friday we got completely drenched in a torrential downpour on Saturday and set out on our explorations again on Sunday in very heavy rain. At least it remains about 15 degrees even on a bad day!
Thought 2 - how expensive is beer! Even in the supermarkets. So far I have not really found anywhere that sells 24 x 375ml bottles of local beer for much less than $40 equivalent to about £25 which having been used to UK supermarket prices is just ridiculous.
Thought 3 - it is not an easy thing to put my finger on but there is just a pleasant feeling walking around the city. Not sure whether it is because people do not seem to be in as much as a hurry as in UK cities or what but after only a couple of days we just feel comfortable walking around town.
Thought 4 - although the season does not start until about March I think I have selected Richmond as my team of choice for the Aussie Rules league. The reason - they remind me of home! They are nicknamed the Tigers, the play in amber (well orange) and black and they are not really very good.
Anyway what have we done over the last couple of days:
- decided that we will do quite a lot of our shopping in Melbourne's markets and became a bit more 'local' by buying our state-of-the-art shopping trolley (see photo). Meat and veg seem to be pretty good value and quality in the markets and it appears that it you turn up early on Sunday morning you can snap up some bargains so going forward it might be a battle between meat shopping and hangovers;
- found ourselves a wine supplier who sells litres of wine for $15 with a $3 refund if you return the bottle (which we can now do after I polished off the first bottle on the day we bought it) and buy 6 get 1 free. You can see a picture of of the wine in the photo strip at the top of this page;
- stayed up until 2am (after a bottle of wine) just to watch the first half of a live Premier League game, which was an exciting nil - nil;
- started to get an impression of what Melbourne Cup weekend means to Melbourne as the city was full of suited men and women in hats yesterday; and
- had 'yum cha' for Sunday lunch at Dragon Boat in Chinatown which was generally very good with the exception of the point where I thought I was being offered 'penis bun' (apparently it was the servers accent and I was actually being offered peanut bun).