First ever blog entry. How exciting. Its a shame that I'm doing it with a hangover and sound distinctly like Mariella Frostrup when I talk.

Sunday night I managed to sleep a pathetic 2 hours. I was still faffing around with my bag at 3am. Organised!!! Got to Manchester and nearly missed the flight so I got in a bad mood. Said goodbye to Mum and Dad and jumped on the shuttle to Heathrow where I met up with Richard for coffee and a muffin and an onward journey to HK. We took some photos of the state we were in due to no sleep on the flight. Not very pretty. Hong Kong wasn't really that enthralling in the grand scheme of things.

Eventually arrived in Melbourne close to midnight and was greeted by Bec and Pip (richard's mates fom France) who are very nice. We woke up the next day at 5.30am and later walked in to the city. Melbourne is brilliant. People are a lot friendlier than those in the likes of say, Morecambe. Super nice. Although the weather was rubbish, we had a pretty good day walking around and taking in the sights and sounds. Had a great lunch in chinatown and listened to a bloke on the steps of the local parliament rant about GM foods. He was on a hunger strike. I don't think that anyone was realaly taking much notice. We thought it was rubbish. Richard got accosted by a drunk aborigine along swanston street which was funny more than anything else. Came back to bec's place and then went to Queen Victoria night market which was awesome, then off to a not very charismatic bar in Brunswick with a very annoying South African barman. Got a bottle of wine from the bottle shop and had steak for dinner. Score.

Thursday 21st Feb started with coffee and toast in the back yard. Sun was out and we took full advantage. Later walked to QV market and grabbed some pizza for lunch and some mangoes for the beach which we later had to throw away due to the heat. Ooops. Managed to walk to St Kilda (2 hr trek) but started getting sunburn(unwittingly) along the way. Went to the War memorial en route which offfered some great views of the city. Eventually got to the beach by which time we had turned into red pandas. Had a dip in the sea and then later found some jellyfish washed up on shore which was a bit worrying. Had the biggest vanilla slice from an awesome cake shop on ackland st and stumbled onto the tram back to Brunswick. Probably picked up some measure of sun stroke that day (apparently the hole in the ozone layer is right above Victoria and no one told us. how rude) as we passed out at around 7pm.