I'm now in Melbourne! On the first day we got here (Saturday) we went for a wander around St. Kilda, because we couldn't check into the hostel til 2pm, but our flight got in at 9.30. We walked down to Acland Street where every other shop is a cake shop! (Ok, that's a bit of an exaggeration but there are four or five all on the same strip, so there's lots!). Kate Laura and I stood outside each one for a good couple of minutes just staring at them, deciding which ones we'd like to eat. We walked down to the Luna park, which apparently is a lot like one they have in Southend, it's just a little theme park which has one small rollercoaster and the rest is the usual fairground rides. Typical seaside funfair.

That afternoon, Laura and I went for a tour round the city with her friend Aaron that she knows from her travels in Egypt. We walked through the city centre and round to the Telstra Dome (they play cricket and Aussie rules there, but it's not the main one, that's the MCG) which is on a little harbour. The harbour is surrounded by loads of 'arty' statues, one of which is of a cow stuck in a tree, cleverly titled 'Cow up a tree'.

On Sunday, the weather was a lot better than the day before so we went for a walk to find a nice beach. A bit later we got a message from some of the Ozintro lads saying that they were on St Kilda beach, so we walked to find them and realised that we'd walked a lot further down the coast than we thought and had to walk a long way back to find them! We spent the rest of the afternoon with the guys before going back to the hostel for pizza and movie night.

The first thing we did yesterday morning was go for cake, because Laura was having a bad morning and managed to delete all her photos from her camera (she got them back in the end), so we went for cheer up cake! The cakes looked gorgeous but tuned out to be a bit of a let down. The girls had got quite badly burnt yesterday and didn't want to stay out long so i went into the city by myself for another wander around. I managed to buy all the stuff I needed so it was quite a productive afternoon.

In the evening we stayed in at the hostel again. We made our dinner but they were then giving away free hotdogs on the BBQ so we had some of those too. We then spent the night playing s***head (for those who don't know that's a card game) in the courtyard and had a really good night, and we weren't even drinking!

Bad news - my mp3 player died this morning :(
We spent the morning sorting out our bags and stuff because we're moving on to Tasmania tomorrow and I tried to play some music while we were doing it and it just died. In the afternoon, we went back into the city to show Kate all the places we'd been with Aaron on the first day.

That evening i met up with Becky and Phil (from uni) who it turns out have been living in St Kilda since before Chrsitmas. We went to a pizza place which does pizza for $5.50 on tuesday nights (which is like 2.50 in pounds) and i had a bolognese mozzarella pizza. Quite a random combination i thought! When i got back to the hostel i realised i'd managed to lock the key to my padlock in the drawer that was locked. Genius! Luckily though, reception had a pair of the huge wire cutter things (like Brian at school used to have for cuttiong padlocks off!), so a guy came and cut it off for me.

Leaving for Tassie tomorrow, another early morning cos we fly at about half 8.