Cocktail Party :P

Ever since I remember I´ve wanted to organize a cocktail party. The idea is to have every guest bringing a different bottle of alcohol, and have a bunch of juices, soft drinks, fruit, berries, cream etc to make all kinds of cocktails. I finally implemented my plan on Wednesday, when we had a cocktail party in our flat. I used facebook - what an entertaining but addicting website - to allocate different alcohols to guests and we ended up having a good variety of them: vodka, bacardi, gin, jägermeister, baileys, kahlua, banana liquor and strawberry liquor. I spent the day carrying different mixers home from Coles and went to buy a big bag of ice from an liquor store on Abercrombie Street. Almost everyone I had invited showed up and we had around 20 people here making cocktails, experimenting different things, drinking them and having a good time :) I brought my laptop downstairs so people could search for different cocktail recipes online, and Tim´s blender was in constant use.


Our bar :P

In the beginning of the party it seemed like we had such excess of alcohol, which of course wasn´t true ;) I tried my best not to get too drunk, that was hard because of having all the cocktail ingredients there. I kept throwing away half of my drinks after tasting them but I ended up being fairly drunk by midnight anyways. Fortunately I wasn´t the only one! I made two cocktails worth mentioning: The first one was vodka, bacardi, cranberry juice, pineapple juice and small chucks of orance and lime. The second one was baileys, banana liquor, milk and a bit of kahlua. Zain was our master bartender, though. He remained sober but mixed the most delicious and pro looking cocktails for everyone. Besides preparing cocktails we listened to music, played never-ever-have-I (people still think it has to be sex related lol) and just hung out. And ran out of alcohol at 2am! The party ended actually pretty early, the last guest leaving already at 3am. I cleaned most of the common room before going to bed, and for some reason - I think it was Jamie - my laptop played this stupid Finnish excursion song Tahdon simpanssia koskettaa in repeat, which was perfect for cleaning lol. All in all, I had a great time and people have told me they liked the party, too, so it was definately worth organizing :) Maybe we´ll have another one before I leave...


Girls: I, Shannon, Kath, Maryse, Jamie and Monica


Kwan, I and Hiro

Even though I had mixed just everything at the party I had no hangover on Thursday! Maybe waking up to drink water throughout the whole night helped, but apart from having a sore throat (because of having the flu) I felt ok. I spent the day working on a group assignment and went to Victoria Park to read a book for a couple of hours. It was Renar´s graduation day - he´s now a master of science! - so we went out to dinner with our flat people. We went to Pancakes in the Rocks, which is a famous pancake restaurant in the Rocks. I had been planning on going there ever since Tim first told me about it in February, but for some reason I had never been there before. I just love the place! Sharon and I shared two dishes: a Greece crepe thing with spinach and cheese and two big pancakes with walnuts, marple syrup and vanilla ice cream :P After the dinner we spent some time in Circular Quay taking pictures of the Opera House and Harbour Bridge at night. It was a beautiful and warm night. Renar and Zain headed to some clubs but I decided to join Tim and Sharon to go home to sleep.


Circular Quay and Harbour Bridge


Tim, I, Zain and Sharon

Blue Mountains Trip

It´s Vice-Chancellors Week, which means no lectures and tutorials. A break feels good indeed, after the hectic last couple of weeks. On Monday I took part in this uni marketing research group discussion. UTS is continuosly aiming to improve its services and marketing to international students, which makes sense since education is one of Australia´s major exporting products. It was a group of 10 international students - all from Europe - discussing about our expections, impressions, positive and negative experiences, opinions etc concerning Australia, Sydney and UTS. The discussion lasted for an hour and half and was constructed to be pretty free - this marketing guy was just kind of providing guidelines and asking some questions. It was interesting noticing how similarly other European students think about many issues. We all had noticed the formation of groups based on nationalities, good service at the uni, not being able to choose the most interesting subjects, interaction and focusing on local issues at lectures etc... Many of us viewed Sydney as a diverse, vibrant and friendly city with lots of space and variable activities. I enjoyed the discussion, and we were given free lunch and $60 cash :) Afterwards around half of us went to Darling Harbour to get coffee from Starbucks and sit outside chatting and enjoying the sunshine. We exchanged contact info, and some of them took part in my cocktail party yesterday :)

We had been planning a day trip to Blue Mountains already for months, and finally did it on Tuesday. It was me, Tim, Renar, Cameron, Kath (Cameron´s (girl)friend from Tasmania), Sharon and Anders (an exchange student from Denmark) taking part in the trip. We woke up at 5.30am to a beautiful morning. Unfortunately not everyone was that excited about the early departure and we missed our train at the Central Station by just few minutes :/ So we sat at the cafe there for almost an hour, reading newspapers and maganizes, before taking the next train to Blue Mountains. The train stopped at almost 20 stations and it took close to two hours to get to Katoomba, from where we took the bus to Echo Point. First we took some pictures of the Three Sisters, which is an impressive rock formation and one of the main attractions. Then we started our hike by going down some 2000 steps! On our way we got to go to one of the sisters before getting all the way down to rainforest. We walked this pretty short loop in the rainforest, where Sharon and I discovered a jungle swing (a bendy branch of tree hanging like a swing) and we had a cookie break. Then we walked past the Three Sisters again, this time on the bottom of them, and continued our way towards the cable train station. Most of the path went along the edge of the rock providing some nice views of the mountains.

I´m holding the mountain together lol

When we got to the cable train station, after walking around 11km, we split into two groups. Tim and Renar took the cable train up to the visitor centre, while the rest of us decided to climb up some thousands of steps! I had already taken the train before when I visited Blue Mountains in February with a tour, so I didn´t want to pay to do it again. Besides, there were some good lookouts on the way up and I took some good pictures. When I reached the top Tim and Renar were there already, taking silly pictures of these naked statues. They persuaded me to join them for some stupid shots, before a school teacher told us to behave in fronf of his group of kids. The others joined us a bit later and we had our picknic lunch. We had brought bread rolls, ham, chicken, cheese, cookies and chocolate, that made up a good meal. And we bought ice cream for dessert. The weather was beautiful and we spent quite a while just laying in the sun before starting our walk back to Echo Point.

The Three Sisters

Anders, Sharon, Tim, I, Cameron, Kath and Renar

This time we walked on top of the cliff so we could see over the mountains. The walk was a lot shorter, too. We stopped for a rather long time at one of the lookouts; just to hang out, take some photos (people liked playing with Cameron´s pro camera), and Tim and Anders climbed to the roof of this little rock cave thing. It wasn´t a long walk back to Echo Point, from where we took the bus to Katoomba. Just to repeat the morning, we missed the train by a couple of minutes and had to wait for an hour for the next one. So we headed to the nearest pub for beer and coke. Our train trip home was entertaining, people playing with cameras etc. Once we got home I just took a shower and pretty much went straight to bed and fell asleep instantly. It was a really nice day altogether to spend outdoors :)

Finance, economics and football

I´m already half done with the spring uni semester :) I had two mid-term exams; in financing and economics. That´s why the past couple of weeks were pretty boring for me. I tried to study as much as possible, but every time I decided to devote my day to studying I got called up from work to do some extra shifts. Which isn´t a bad thing since I´ll need all the money I can get for my major traveling! (I´ll tell about my traveling plans later.) Both of my exams were on Saturdays and I missed two Birthday parties because of having to go to bed early on Friday nights :/ The fun things I did during my (inefficient) exam preparation time include: cooking Mexican food with Moy, going to the movies to see The Bourne Ultimatum, watching some movies at home (recommend Spanglish), going to a Japanese restaurant with Kwan followed by Chinese moon cakes and a few drinks in Darling Harbour and going to the hairdresser. Instead of going to the posh hairdressers on Pitt Street I went to this new place on Broadway. They had an opening sale of $80 for color and cut. All the staff is Asian and even though not all of them speak good English they were very friendly and helpful. I wanted to go for a lighter color for the summer so I got blond highlights. The guy that cut my hair is Korean and spoke hardly any English. Fortunately he had a friend translating for him and the cut turned out alright, even though it´s a bit shorter than I actually wanted.

I´ve got a feeling I didn´t do that well on my exams :/ I underperformed at both of them, which is uncharacteristic to me. I tend to perform well at exam situations, but here I always get distracted by the short answering time (usually 1h30min-2h) and start rushing my answers. I think I passed the exams, though, which is all that really counts. Since I haven´t set any bets this semester I´ve got no need to aim for high grades. I´ll have plenty of time to be ambitious when I return to LUT! We had an interesting way to form project groups at Human Resource Management, though. First we were asked to determine which grade we were aiming for the project, and then we got grouped based on that. I figured I could just as well go for high distinction (the highest possible grade) to get a hard working group to work with. It turned out to be a good choice since our group is doing pretty well. The professor is really demanding, though, and you never exactly know what she´s looking for.

Yesterday after I was done with my economics exam I went to watch a football game with Tim and Loure Lou (an exchange student from France). It was a preliminary final game so the winner gets to play for the championship. The game was at Telstra Stadium and there were over 32 000 people watching it! It was Manly Seaeagles (a Sydney team) playing against a team from Brisbane, Queensland. Since Manly is Tim´s favorite team we all supported them. Even though I´m not a big fan of football - I prefer ice hockey and Finnish baseball - it was fun watching a live game. I wasn´t familiar with the rules so it was good having Tim explaining them to me. I actually got pretty excited cheering for Manly and was happy when they won 28-6! I´m glad I went to see the game, especially since Tim and I had talked about going pretty much ever since I arrived here.

Football game at Telstra Stadium

Today was a day of total relaxation... Moy and I took the bus to Circular Quay and went running around the Domain and Botanical Gardens. It was really nice indeed :) The weather was sunny but quite windy, which was just perfect - warm but not too hot - for sport. There were lots of people walking or just sitting on the grass, enjoying the afternoon. Compared to my last visit in the Botanical Gardens there were a lot more flourishing plants and flowers this time. Summer is coming! After our run we did some sit-ups and push-ups on the grass before taking the bus back home. It was nice exercising outside for a chance, and we decided to keep it up. For lunch I had Japanese miso soup that I prepared all by myself yesterday. Some months ago Kwan invited me to join him and his friends to cook dinner and that´s when I was taucht to cook miso soup. It took me a while to actually make the initiative to try it, but once I did I noticed it´s pretty simple. You can cook miso soup pretty much with everything - fish, meat, tofu, veggies - and eat it with rice. Healthy and tasty :P And now I just finished playing monopoly with flatmates... I was the first one to go bankrupt :( The rest of them are still playing, but I decided to come upstairs because I´m feeling a bit sick. Oh, and I got the cutest postcard from Carla :D She must know how happy I feel getting mail, especially since I don´t usually get anything. Thanks darling!

Contact info

Hi! Just a short message to let you know my lut-email address isn´t working at the moment. So please do NOT email me to maria.claudelin@lut.fi but use my uts-email maria.claudelin@student.uts.edu.au instead. And if you´ve sent me any email during the past week or so please re-send it to my uts-email. I dunno why my lut-email is down. I no longer have access to weboodi, either. Maybe they decided to kick me out of uni lol.

APEC

This past week Sydney hosted the APEC summit. It stands for Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation and brings together the leaders of 21 countries from the area; including the United States, China and Russia. The summit lasted for the whole week with meetings among business leaders and ministers, and ended with the Leader´s Meeting over the weekend. Sydney was quite messed up during the week: Many areas in the city centre were closed from public, police ran searches and there were special arrangements for public transportation. Citizens were even advised to avoid any unnecessary visits to the city centre and Friday was public holiday. APEC was the highest level security operation ever conducted in Australia (even higher than the 2000 Olympics), mostly due to fears of violent protests against the summit and especially against George Bush. There were quite many protests, including students marching on Wednesday, but they all were considerably peaceful.

The main issues discussed in APEC were climate change, trade agreements, economic development and security. John Howard (the prime minister of Australia) actually succeeded in hailing a climate change agreement including the world´s major polluters, China and the US. The commitment has been strongly criticised because of lack of specific binding targets, though. It basically states that long-term aspirational goals for post-Kyoto time are needed. It´s going to be interesting if they´ll actually come up with something more concrete at the UN conference in December. Another major topic was coming in terms with multilateral trade agreements, but the conclusion was only stating the importance of support for the Doha Round. In my opinion the summit was mostly succesful in strenghtening political and economic relations between individual nations. For example, Australia made a deal to export notable amounts of uranium to Russia.

All in all, it has been interesting following the news and decisions made during APEC. I´m still in the process of reading todays newspapers about all the talks and agreements that took place during the meetings. And in general, during this year I´ve learned quite a lot about the politics and especially economics within the Asia-Pacific area. Since Australia mainly trades with the US and increasingly with China, Japan and India, the media mainly covers those areas and the issues are brought up at our lectures, too. It has raised my interest towards Asia, both in terms of business and cultures, and if I ever get the opportunity to work anywhere within the Asia-Pacific area I´ll be more than happy to accept it! That´s one of the reasons why I´m doing a stop-over in Hong Kong on my way back home; to get a feeling of the city to see if I´d like to live there sometimes in the future.

Now that I got to the topic, I´m so excited about all the opportunities future has to offer me! After graduating I can work basically anywhere in the world and for any interesting company, trying to pursue my goals of having a succesful international career. I´m already looking forward to all the challenges and new experiences, and to be honest I also wanna earn some money. I know I can´t be too selective about my first jobs, but if I got to choose I´d like to work among marketing environmental products/services. The trend towards consumers demanding enviromentally friendly options is increasing pretty much everywhere, which I see as positive development. So hopefully that will open some good job opportunities for me within the field I´m most interested in. But before anything else I gotta graduate, which reminds me of the two mid-term exams coming up this and next week...

Jamie, Sharon, Moy, Cameron, Carlos and I in a cocktail bar

Melbourne: buildings & shops

Sunday was our last day together in Melbourne. My flight back to Sydney departed at 7pm (or should´ve departed if it hadn´t been delayed) and Juulia flew back to Perth on Monday. We hadn´t any special plans for the day, so we just walked around to check out any nice looking parks and buildings. The weather was sunny but a little windy. We were a bit cold at first wearing just thongs and light shirts, but it got warmer later on. First we went to this park, where we found a conservatorium with beautiful flowers inside it and Captain Cook´s Cottage. It had been built in the 1700s in England and then shipped to Australia and rebuilt in that park. Go figure the rationale behind that! Then we went to see this old cathedral, which was really beautiful both outside and inside. Our last buildings to see were the parliament house, the exchibition centre and Melbourne museum. We had decided not to go to museums during this trip, due to our limited amount of time. We considered going to this Pixar exchibition, though, but didn´t really have the time.

In the flower conservatorium

Inside the cathedral

The Exchibition Centre

After our buildings-tour we walked pretty randomly around the city centre going to any nice looking malls and shops. Neither of us bought anything, but we saw some more cool malls! We ended up walking close to this donut shop, so we bought donuts and coffee and went to sit on the stairs in front of the rainway station to eat them. It was a perfect place - sunny and sheltered from wind - so we sat there for over half an hour just chatting and looking at all the people. There were lots of people there, considering it was Sunday. They say people dress more fashionable in Melbourne, which I think is true. After the donut break we continued our shopping tour, still not buying anything, walking towards Chinatown to have lunch there. We ate at this cheap Chinese place and got huge portions! I took half of mine with me to eat in the plane.

Inside a mall

Then it was time for me to go back to the hostel to pick up my luggage and take the tram to the bus station, from where I catched the shuttle bus to the airport. Juulia accompanied me, and we sat on the grass by Yarra River for a while before my shuttle bus left. When I got to the airport (which is tiny, by the way) I found out my flight was delayed by 40min. I just sat there writing some notes about the trip. (That´s the only way to remember everything for writing such detailed stories on this blog.)

A free tramp going around the city centre

Yay, I´m finally done writing about the trip! It´s taken me forever so I hope you guys feel like reading it. I know you do read this blog, but I´m a bit dissappointed having no one commenting my stories :/

The Great Ocean Road

We spent Friday and Saturday driving on the Great Ocean Road (GOR), which is a famous scenic road on the coastline of south-west Victoria. It starts officially from Geelong (80km from Melbourne) and ends in Warrnambool, making it around 250km long.

We had booked a car at an info desk at our hostel and it was supposed to be delivered to us at 9am on Friday morning. But while we were still eating breakfast we got a call from the rental guy asking us to pick it up earlier. So we rushed downstairs, and that´s when I forgot to take my jacket with me. I ended up loosing it for good, even though I called the hostel later that day and checked all the common areas and our rooms after returning from the road trip. I´m still feeling pretty sad since it was rather expensive :( Anyways, we began our journey trying to find our way out of the city centre to the highway. I was driving and managed to get to M1 without making too bad mistakes or getting completely lost. It was the biggest highway I´ve driven on, with 5 lines, and I drove till we got to Torquay, where we got some gas.

It´d be sad if you didn´t already know this when you hit the road!

Juulia drove to this lighthouse lookout, which was the first one of our many short stops along the road. Then we drove to Lorne to see Teddy´s Lookout, providing a good view over the shoreline and the weindy GOR right next to the water. We also went to see Erskine Falls, and after walking down some stairs we got to admire the long, deep waterfall surrounded by rainforest. The weather was very unpredictable - it kept alternating between sunshine and rain. The wind was really strong during the whole day! We were pretty lucky with the weather, though, since it was dry whenever we stopped to get out of the car to take a look at some places. The only lookout we ended up skipping because of rain was in Apollo Bay, where we had lunch at a cafe with a good view over the shoreline.

The Great Ocean Road from Teddy´s Lookout

Erskine Falls

From Torquay to Apollo Bay the road went right along the shoreline providing beautiful views of the turquoise water, high waves and deep cliffs. The road was pretty narrow and full of turns (each turn had a sign so it was easy to reduce speed for them) making driving interesting. It was our favorite part of the GOR :) The next part of the road, to Cape Otway, was mainly in the forest making the landscape completely different. We were kinda undecided about wanting to drive 12 extra kilometres to this lighthouse but decided to go for it, which wasn´t such a great decision. Reading Lonely Planet we had assumed it´d cost $11.50 to climb up to the lighthouse, but in reality that was a fee to go through a gate to the area. Since we had already driven some extra to get there we paid the fee and had to rush to see the lighthouse in just 25min before the place closed. It was incredibly windy up there! We had actually hard time trying to walk around the lighthouse. The views were good, though, and we took some nice pictures.

Lighthouse in Cape Otway

We wanted to see the Twelve Apostles, which is one of the main attractions along the GOR, at sunset. But even though we arrived there just in time it was too cloudy to see the sunset. The apostles were impressive anyways and we decided to come back the next day for a better view of them. By the time we hit the road again it was dark already, and we just drove to our destination, Warrnambool. We found a good backpackers place with a big common room and a huge TV. Juulia watched the movie Actually Love with some others while I was writing some notes of our trip. We were lucky to be the only people in our room, where we had a heater and heaps of thick blankets to keep us warm!

The weather wasn´t much better on Sunday: It was still windy and cloudy, but no rain. Before leaving Warrnambool we went to see this lookout, which was nothing special. Then on our way out of the town we noticed a cheese factory and a shop. We went in for some free tastings (delicious) and I bought a small piece of herb cheddar cheese. We stopped at few more lookouts before getting to London Bridge. It had originally been two bridges over the water, but the other one had collapsed leaving just a pole reminding a standing apostle. The Twelve Apostles weren´t far from there, and we went there to see them in proper daylight. Actually the apostles used to be connected to mainland, then they became bridges, and finally just apostles due to erosion. All of these rock formations are dimishing at the erosion speed of 2cm per year. From the apostles we drove to Gibson Steps. There had been natural formations reminding steps there, so they had made real steps down to the beach. From down there you could really see how steep the stone wall is!

The London Bridge

The Twelve Apostles

After that bundle of impressive lookouts we drove to Cape Cod, where we stopped at an info cafe to ask for any nearby walking tracks. The man working there told us about waterfalls that we could see along this smaller road. So we left the GOR for a while to drive to the waterfalls. Our first destination were Triplefalls. We walked a 2km-long loop that took us through really green rainforest with huge trees (about 50-60m tall). The name of the falls describes them well, since it really is three waterfalls next to each other. After driving a bit more we came to another waterfall, whose name I cannot remember anymore. This time we walked 3km, first going down a lot to reach this one steep and powerful waterfall, and then going up the same way. Neither of us was feeling cold after climbing up the path! There would´ve been one more waterfall, but because we were getting hungry already we decided to skip it. So we drove some 20km along a very small and windy road, with a maximum speed of around 50km/h. Our little car got pretty dirty on the way lol.

The Triplefalls

We had lunch again in Apollo Bay, and since we had already seen all the major attractions from there on we just drove straight back to Melbourne. It was my turn to drive the beautiful beach part of the GOR. I´m glad we reached the big highway by the time it got dark, because it would´ve been challenging driving on the narrow and windy coastal road in the dark. When we arrived in Melbourne we had to return our car to this multi level car park and were a bit doubtful about finding our way there. But we did a good job, Juulia driving and I reading the map, and safely parked the car there. Then we walked to our hostel, where we had noodles for dinner and went to bed pretty early.

Melbourne: shopping (and eating)

Thursday was a beautiful day: warm and sunny, but a bit windy. It was nice enough to wear thongs (Juulia borrowed me her Havainas - the most popular thongs brand in Australia - so I wouldn´t have to suffer in my Scetchers anymore), a T-shirt and rolled up jeans. After having big breakfast at our hostel we took the tramp to Victoria Markets, which is huge sheltered outdoor market place with hundreds of tables! We spent quite a while just walking around and taking a look at the all the stuff: handicrafts, clothes, shoes, accessories, souvenirs, delicates, veggies & fruit... I bought a black belt and a scarf. We also bought delicious fruit smoothies and ate them while walking to the tramp stop to go to St.Kilda, which is the beach part of the city. Melbourne isn´t so well known for its beach life, which makes sense since the beach is pretty small compared to for example Bondi Beach in Sydney. Instead Melbourne is more known for its European like athmosphere with lots of restaurants, cafes and clubs, as well as interesting architechture and different forms of arts.

Anyways, we began our St.Kilda tour at a rather small park with lots of tall palm trees. We found swings, and I had to go swinging :) Then we walked along the beach. The street was under renovations and the fences were a bit distracting. We sat there for a while anyways just enjoying the bright sunshine. We would´ve wanted to go to an amusement park but unfortunately it was closed so we just walked past it. Then we took a look at all the little shops and cafes around there. They had some cute little clothes stores, and I bought my own pair of Havainas. There were so many cake shops selling tons of different delicious looking cakes :P We spent quite a while comparing all the cakes in different shops before deciding to split a cheese twist and a chocolate mud cake slice in one of them.

Park in St.Kilda

Lots of cakes :P

When we got back to the city centre we started wandering around to check out different malls and clothes stores. There´re so many cool malls there; either nice old buildings or posh modern centres. I took so many photos of the malls! We both bought skirts from this little no-chain shop. Unfortunately it was getting pretty late and most of the shops were closing, so we walked back to the hostel to get ready for dinner. We had decided to go to the Japanese restaurant we had spotted out the previous day, and crossed the river to get there. The view was beautiful with all the lights besides the water, plus a lighted ferries wheel. On our way to the restaurant we saw Experimental Playground, which was an exhibition of some sort. Because of being so hungry we decided not to go inside, but we rode these funny baby cars outside. Just like we had predicted the restaurant was furnished in Japanese style - they even had private rooms where customers sat on cushions on the floor - and the waitresses were wearing kimonos. I ate a dish with noodles, Miso soup and very fried veggies (so fried that I ended up peeling them).

Inside a cool mall

Another mall

Riding a baby car

In front of the Japanese restaurant

After dinner we took the tramp to Fitztroy, which is another partying area besides the city centre. Due to it being a Thursday night there weren´t a lot of people there, but we walked along the main street looking at different bars. We ended up going to Bar with No Name, which was a rather small and cosy bar with a few separate rooms. We had Bacardi Breezers and sat by the window. We returned back to the hostel already before midnight.

Outdoor activities and Melbourne (part 1)

I´m so behind in writing my blog. But I promise to do my best in updating it this week! It means less time for studying, though...

I just got back from a very nice holiday :) First Juulia (from LUT, who is on exchange in Perth this year) came to visit me in Sydney for some days. Even though I had to work and do uni stuff I hung out with her when ever I was free. The weather was really nice over the weekend and we spent a lot of time outside. On Saturday we took part in this food festival, which was a part of an international in-fusion week organized at the UTS. It was held at the Gumal roof top. There was a cooking competition (meaning we got to taste heaps of different dishes from all over the world!) and some performances. The coolest performers were these Spanish dancers, who were really skilled! We also walked around the Royal Botanical Gardens and the Rocks, and had drinks at this nice bar called Bar 333 on George Street. On Sunday we took the train & bus to Bondi Beach and did a 5km-long walk along the shore to Cogee Beach. It was a lot warmer than I had thought and I was feeling too hot in my black T-shirt. Fortunately I was wearing a blue bra that looked a lot like a bikini top, so I ended up walking the whole day in by bras lol. We had lunch in Darling Harbour, where they had a Malesian food festival. There´s a really cool exchibition there, too. It´s a set of big photograph stands, taken all over the world of pristine landscapes and characteristic/cultural views of a particular country. There´s one photograph from Finland: A lighted indoor building to grow plants, in the middle of snowy fields. The theme of the exchibition, in my opinion, is the diversity of the world and the importance of protecting it against pollution/climate change/any harmfull actions. Besides the photographs the exchibition included lots of information and interesting facts.

Spanish dancers at In-Fusion Festival

Shoreline along Bondi-Cogee walk

On Wednesday morning Juulia and I left for a vacation in Melbourne. We had an early flight, and even though it took almost an hour to take the airport shuttle bus from Avalon Airport to the city centre we had plenty of time to start explorering the city. Our hostel was centrally located so we could walk pretty much everywhere within the city centre. It was one of the best backpackers I´ve been to so far: tidy and warm rooms, good showers and big common areas including a roof top. They served free breakfast every day, and additional food (big breakfast, pasta and pancakes) on certain days. They also organized activities such as shopping trips, pub crowls and AFL-games.

After dropping off our luggage at the hostel it was time for lunch. We walked just a few blocks from the hostel to find these two narrow walk-only streets full of small cute cafes and lunch places! Most of them were missing their front walls and some of their tables were placed outside. They were all furnished and decorated nicely. We walked around just enjoying the athmosphere and trying to decide where to eat. I ended up having a huge bowl of chicken soup at this small place, whose workers were really helpful and friendly. At first I ordered some Greec soup that tasted too sour for me, but they exchanged it to the chicken soup for free. Then, because their EFTPOS machine didn´t work, they trusted me to run to the closest ATM to withdraw cash before coming back to pay. The area as a whole became my personal favorite part of Melbourne!

Cafes & lunch places in Melbourne

We crossed the road to the modern Federation Square and headed straight to the info centre to collect some maps and brochures. Then we walked along Yarra River, which seems to be a popular area among runners, and crossed a bridge to Botanical Gardens. (Every single Australian city/town/village seems to have Botanical Gardens. They´re really cool in the bigger cities, but nothing special in the smaller ones.) We spent quite a while walking around there looking at different sections; including Chinese and Californian plants, roses, herbs... And had a coffee/coke break sitting by a small pond, listening to someone playing the harp and admiring the black swans swimming there. At that point my new Scetcher-shoes had started to hurt my right heel really badly :( I kept limping the whole day, and the foot was all swollen and bruised by the end of the day.

Federation Square

Botanical Gardens

We saw the Parliament House from distance and would´ve wanted to go there, but after walking around it found out you can only access it with a guided tour. We went to see the Shrine of Remembrance instead, which is a memorial for Victorians killed in WW1. (Australians have a good number of war memorials considering they´ve only fought wars as allies of other countries.) This memorial was massive with impressive Ancient style architechture. It provided a really good view over Melbourne from its balcony! Then we went on to walk along the river and saw a bunch of rowing clubs, restaurants and a shopping centre. We found a really nice looking Japanese restaurant in the shopping centre and decided to come back to eat there. We kept walking till we came to Crown Casino, which is the biggest casino in Australia. They had heaps of gampling tables and machines, a hotel with posh looking halls and some restaurants there. It was big but obviously nothing compared to casinos in Las Vegas.

Yarra river

It was time to walk back to our hostel to get ready to go to watch the musical The Phantom of the Opera. I´m glad we dressed up since all the other people at the theatre were wearing pretty formal clothes, too. (Unlike when I went to see a musical at the Sydney Opera House, where some people were wearing jeans and thongs. But I hear that in general people dress more nicely in Melbourne.) After discovering free city trams don´t run after 6pm we ended up walking to the Princess Theathe. It´s a rather old, beautiful building and a perfect venue for the musical. Unfortunately taking pictures isn´t allowed inside. After picking up our tickets we went to eat pizza to a nearby restaurant, and then it was time to enjoy the musical, which was amazing! When I first found out they´re performing The Phantom of the Opera in Melbourne I decided I just have to see it, which was definately the right choice. Everything - the music, signing, acting, dancing (ballet), props, costumes - was great and I just sat there in amazement :) I don´t think I can emphasize enough how much I enjoyed the performance. The coolest props were this huge crystal crown hung from the ceiling and swung up and down, where the phantom was standing, and also a boat sailing, surrounded by fog and candles raising from the floor. We wanted to have a nice ending for the evening, so after the musical we went to a nearby cocktail bar and ordered some proper cocktails. They were made of real fruit and berries and were really delicious, however rather expensive.

The Princess Theatre

Juulia and I drinking cocktails