Melbourne Mayhem

Friday was Leslie's Birthday. I visited the Airlie park in the morning with the kids and there i met another nanny who lives one street down who's from Germany, so we exchanged contacts so that she can now have some people to go on adventures with and will allow us to talk to ppl other than the 5 others we live with. We prepared a delicious chocolate cake and told Wyatt that the cake was a surprise... but during delicious Indian food dinner he told her there was a cake in the fridge. We proceeded to escape after dinner to try and have an eventful night... but, being still jet lagged and getting over colds we were pretty sad looking bar goers. We walked down lots of Chapel st which had nice looking stores and chose a bar.. where we had an expensive Australian beer each, sat on a sofa and watched a bit of AFL on the big screen.. the night ended around 10:30... which was late for us haha.

Saturday saw us going to the Melbourne Museum. There was a whole new exhibit on the history of Melbourne which we read pretty thoroughly and i now know alot more about the city I am living in.. basically this town would not have been if it was not for the gold rush in the 1850s.
All the other exhibits we had to quickly go though cuz we wanted to see everything. I will have to return to read and learn more... to keep my brain going since I will not be studying. The other exhibits were on the brain, the human body, drugs, a famous race horse, modern inventions, animals, insects, marine life, the aboriginal people who used to own the land.. and the kids zone, which we did not have time to visit.. but i'm sure I will get the chance too.
We wanted to head to the Queen st markets but we spent so much time at the museum that we just decided to grab a sushi roll and home for a BBQ.

Sunday we planed to go to Dandenong national park.. but we stepped outside and it was so gorgeous that we just felt like going to the beach. So we found our way to St.Kilda beach where we looked at the Esplanade artisan market, walked by Luna park and then along the board walk infront of the beach which was full of people since school holidays started this weekend. There were tons of shows and events going on, so we often lay down infront of the stages and listened to lovely jazz, and men singing quartet-ish thing. We then took the tram to South Melbourne Port, but got lost on the way, luckily a German/Australian man and his daughter sort of lived near the beach at south melbourne so they walked with us a good 15 minute through a gorgeous neighborhood with small houses attached to each other and all the balcony's had nice metal decorations along the top of the balcony's called... euh i don't know. We walked along the beach surrounded by expensive looking condos and at the port was the cruise ship to Tasmania.

Later we ventured to Footscray. Leslie had that morning gone onto a Melbourne group of couchsurfing and discovered that some ppl were meeting up for an all you can eat Ethiopian dinner. We had no idea if these ppl all knew each or not but we decided to go for it. We met with 4 other random people from Melbourne, England, Germany and Switzerland, waited forever for the buffet to start, ate till we burst, and all the other well traveled people told us of their crazy adventures.

Tuesday John and Joanne arrived in the morning, so now we have a houseful of people. In the afternoon Leslie and I ventured to Chadstone, a massive mall a 30 minute walk from our place, it was so big and so confusing as a mall and so fashionable. We had seen a desk on the side of the road on the walk over and on the way back it was still there... luckily it had wheels so i pushed it for a good 10 minutes along the side walk, lost a wheel.. then another, but with leslies help managed to get it back.. and now i have a desk woo!! its kinda grafitied but we shall figured out some crazy art work to cover it all, the kids thought it was a great new toy haha. At night we celebrated Jeffs birthday with some more awesome chocolate cake. what a great discovery this cake is.

Today was full of fun. I went to the aquarium with Mel, the kids, John and Joanne. We though there was an aquarium pass for me so when we got there we got them to look Julia up in the system but they couldn't find it.. so they thought maybe it was spelt wrong or something of that sort. anyway they kept my "i.d" for the full of the visit to try and find something that corresponded... and i picked it up on my way out willing to pay since i guess there is no membership... but the man was like it's ok for today wooo.. 27$ saved by making a big deal out of nothing haha. anyway aquarium was fun, the most exciting parts being the jelly fish, the sharks and the massive rays!!
Later i ventured on my own to federation park to see all the festivities for the AFL week.. the finals are this weekend. I saw some crazy acrobat routine and got some free stuff from all the booths and had just missed the Australian Idol show.. but got to see the judges wooo :P.
Lastly i headed to the immigration museum which was very interesting... but i got tired of reading and my feet hurt so i will have to make another return some other time.
thats all for now folks.