Melbourne. It is quite like Bournemouth! It’s funny to be the furthest away from home that we can get yet it feels more like home than anywhere else. We spent the first week relaxing and getting to know Hayden, James’ flat mate, as James was off on a business trip. We looked around the town centre and found all the usual shops and a train system rather like the tube. The town has a tram system as well which is quite useful and you can buy one ticket and use train, tram and bus so getting around won’t be too hard – although it is obviously a place built for cars. There are some local shops that can be walked to, Murumbeena one way and Carnegie the other, so we stocked up on rice and eggs and fresh veggies. We are going to try and live mostly of veggies and rice while we’re here, partly for health and partly because now we are in a western country we are poor. Vincent hoped to begin looking for a job this week but he managed to stub his toe on James’ sofa and it broke. It has gone back into place ok but went very black and blue and swollen for some time. We took him to the doctors as we though there was a reciprocal health thing with the NHS but they wanted 60 dollars just to look at it and when a guy wearing a stethoscope behind the receptionist chipped in ‘they can’t do anything’ we decided to let it heal itself and he spent the next two days trying, not very hard, to keep his foot up on the sofa.
On Saturday this week James took us to the beach. There is a peninsula a few hours drive from Melbourne that is surf beach on one side and calm bay on the other. We got a fish/veggie and chips lunch from a local shop and sat on the sand teasing the seagulls. The bay side was lovely and calm so we had a bit of a paddle in the water, but it was very cold coming off the southern ocean so no swimming. The surf beach was very high waves and crashing surf so it looked pretty but we didn’t go in the water. There were a few people out surfing but not any that could actually stand up. The drive was very pleasant in James nice company Nissan and on roads that had tarmac the whole time. It felt very western. On the way back we saw a bit of the fire damaged bush from the fires that devastated a large area of Northern Melbourne recently. It looked all burnt out and black from afar but when you look closely you can see lots of new life, apparently lots of plants here need fire to germinate so hopefully the damage to the wildlife will be repaired in a few months.