Hi again, Just spent a fantastic 3 nights in Melbourne staying with Rachel's auntie, uncle and cousins. Tamie (her auntie) picked us up from the airport when we flew in from Cairns and we spent the first evening playing with the kids, Anna and Luke who are both reallly lovely although pretty excitable, but we all got on well and we got definite brownie points for giving many piggie-back rides. The next day Rachel and I took ourselves into the centre of Melbourne and had a great time looking round the most fantastic food market I've ever seen, I swear we could have lived quite happily in there jsut eating olives and ginerbread men all day long... We also went to the new art gallery which we both really enjoyed, it had a lot of brilliant indigenous art which put the stuff you get in the tourist shops to shame. Finally, after a quick trip to an outdoor shope to get some attractive thermal tops (it's cold!) we went back and spent the evening chatting to Tamie and Ian and drinking nice wine. All good. Yesterday was fun cos it was Luke's 6th birthday party, it was at the local gymnasium so the kids had a brilliant time on the trampolines and high bars whilst we made drinks and helped Tamie with the marshmallow and rice crispie squares. I'd forgotten how much fun kids parties were. They then took us down to St Kilda, the district next to the harbour for the afternoon which was really nice, with loads of dead jellyfish on the beach, and we spent the rest of the day playing with Luke's new toys. It was really nice just to get a break from the backpacking scene even though it's a lot of fun, but we were missing proper beds, hot showers and the like. Can't believe how fast our time in Oz has gone by, it's been brilliant but I'm really excited abotu New Zealand now I've seen more photos of all the stuff that's there, plus the weatherforecast is lookign good so we might get some skiing done if we're lucky. lots of love, Monica x x x x