Rainy Day Blues

Yesterday turned out to be a pretty packed afternoon. After leaving the internet cafe, we headed over to Federation Square which is fairly unremarkable, save a giant building with some really interesting architechture. But we did encounter a very nice old man, who is part of a volunteer team dedicated to helping clueless tourists like ourselves find all kinds of interesting (and free) things to do.

He pointed us to a free bus tour that circles the city and drops off/picks up people at about 15 different points throughout the city. Luckily for us, one of those points was the old Melbourne Gaol... which we didn't realize was pronounced "jail" until the pre-recorded "tour guide" on the bus started talking about it. We had been saying "ga-ohl" to each other all day. Whoops. On the way to the gaol/jail we happened upon this street sign:

That's right folks. The Batcave is in Melbourne, Australia.

Anyhow, the gaol was pretty amazing and creepy. We got to see the little cells they had to stay in, and each one had a little story about one of the more famous inmates. They used to hang people in there too, so we got to see the gallows that they used and they even had the equipment/suit they used on display. CreeEEEeepy. We also had fun pretending Eryn was a prisoner at this jail/gaol:


We also found this vintage clothing store that was suggested in the Lonely Planet book at which I found and bought a shirt with the Hostess logo on it. Hostess makes Twinkies. For those of you who get the joke, I was pretty proud of myself for that find ;)

Afterwards, we headed over to the Fiztroy area for dinner. After walking up and down the street for what seemed like forever (I was particulrly hypoglycemic, so it probably was only 5 minutes), we picked this place called Red... um.... Red-something and promptly started to stuff our faces. We also shared a bottle of wine by a winery called "Scuttlebutt," which quickly became our new favorite word for the evening.

It was only about 6:15pm when we finished dinner, so we decided to roll ourselves out the door and down the street to look at some of the shops around the area. Unfortunately, most of them were closed, so we just hopped into a taxi and headed back to the hotel. Oh, and apparently, renovations and reconstruction tends to follow us around... Not only do we get to wake up to the sounds of drills and sawing in our Sydney hotel, but our Melbourne hotel also decided this was a good time to do some renovating as well:

Anyhow, we were pretty exhausted, and it was still early, so we figured we'd just chill out a bit and head out later in the evening. However, after a game of Rummy 500 (in which I made an AMAZING comeback to secure 2nd place), we pretty much decided it was time for bed.

Anyhow, today turned out to be pretty rainy and cloudy. Unfortunately for us, there isn't much to do in Melbourne when its raining (thus the long blog post). But we aren't letting it get us down! (not too much, anyway) We'll be headed over to check out the Esplanade Hotel later tonight, which is a local venue suggested to us by an Aussie friend in Sydney.

Gotta run!

-e