From Sydney we flew to Melbourne which was only a 1 hour flight which was great! When we finally got to the city centre we went straight to Mc Donald's for some Sunday breakfast then started on a massive trek with our heavy backpacks to try and find the hostel! After walking uphill down the wrong street I finally gave up and Ady thankfully carried both backpacks back down hill! We finally found the hostel and got checked in then went to find everyone. We met Ryan, Rachel, Alicia and Dan at a place called Federation Square which is a popular place in Melbourne and contains lots of bars and restaurants and has a massive flat screen T.V outside showing different sports etc. Our first impressions of Melbourne were really good. It's a lot smaller than Sydney and is a lot more laid back too! It's also a very arty type of place. A lot of the buildings have sculptures outside or the buildings themselves our modern and colourful and there are trams that take you all around the city.
On our second day in Melbourne we said goodbye to Rachel who was going back to England after a 3 week holiday in Oz. We then decided to check out St Kilda which is a 20 minute tram ride away and is a beach resort in Melbourne although nowhere near as nice as the ones in Sydney!
St Kilda is a really nice little resort with nice shops and the beach and promenade is nice especially on a sunny day. We spent the day on the beach and wondering around the shops, and then got the hot, packed tram back to the city!
Me, Ady, Ryan, Dan and Alicia decided to get a family room between us at a place called Victoria Hall which is a budget hostel/hotel. The rooms were really nice but the kitchen was terrible! It hadn't been changed from an old canteen and really needed renovating!
After a few chilled out days in Melbourne we decided we had to start trying to get a job again which we both weren't happy about! We did 20 or more CV's each and blitzed the bars and restaurants. We both got a phone call each from different restaurants for a trial the next week which was great as there were a lot of backpackers looking for jobs and not many jobs available at all!
My trial shift was in a bakery/coffee shop/restaurant/ice cream parlour/juicer/pizzeria/sandwich shop! Yep it turned out to be all of these in one and it was a nightmare! In the two hours I was there on my trial I was trying to get my head around all of this and prices in my head which wasn't easy! After my trial I got the job but didn't really want to work there so I decided to keep looking.
I got a call from a restaurant called Feddish which is a nice place on Federation Square. The trial went well and it seemed a lot better than the other place! Ady got a phone call the same weeks as me and had a trial in the restaurant right next to Feddish and he ended up getting the job too which was great, especially as they were next door to each other!
The week we both got the jobs was the start of the Australian Open Tennis Championships which meant we were thrown in the deep end working one of the busiest 2 weeks of the year! The tennis was shown on the big screen in Fed Sq which was cool and it was packed full of people all the time. The temperature got ridiculous the week of the tennis. It reached 44 degrees and stayed like that for 4 days. Luckily we had air-con but I felt sorry for the tennis players!
When we both had a day off we had lunch with my great Aunt Phyllis who lives in Melbourne with her family. She took us for lunch and we had a good catch up which was nice and arranged to meet back up.
Adys first shift at the restaurant was on Australia Day which is the busiest day of the year! Australia Day is massive here and it was nice to see people celebrating their own day which is what we should do in England. They had a carnival for the morning then the rest of the afternoon was spent in Federation Square and at the bars around the city. I felt sorry for Ady though as it was his first shift in the bar and the restaurant was packed which meant he had no time to get used to the table numbers or how the till works and he ended up having to do a 12 hour shift with only a 10 minute break, which for Ady meant he was starving by the end of the day!
We both worked lots of hours while the open tennis was on but managed on the Saturday to get the day off to actually go and watch the tennis. I got free tickets from work so we spent the day walking around the courts and watching different matches in the sweltering heat! In the evening I was working but Ady managed to get tickets with Dan to watch the Andrew Murray match which they said was really good to see.
After 3 weeks in Melbourne we said goodbye to Ryan who left Australia to travel around South America, so the rest of us decided to move to a different hostel called Urban central which turned out to be really good! We got a TV in our room with free breakfast in the morning.
On one of our days off together we met up with one of my Nan and granddads friends that lives in Melbourne called Maria. She took us all out for the day and we ended up going for a really nice pub lunch then on a steam train called the puffing Billy which goes through the Dandedong ranges on the outskirts of Melbourne which was a nice day out of the city for us.
The next week the temperature dropped a bit but on the following Saturday we were there to experience the hottest day ever on record for Melbourne. The temperature reached 48 degrees and I had to walk to work! By the time I got to work I felt faint, I was sweating like mad and had wind burn on my face it was awful! It was like putting your head in the oven and the wind was really strong and hot. By the evening there had been 6 or 7 bush fires started in different areas across Victoria and unfortunately some of them were lit deliberately.
The next day we heard just how bad it was getting, hundreds had lost their homes and a lot of people had died in the fires overnight. We couldn't see any of the fires from where we were staying but they were only 30 minutes from the city which wasn't far at all really. Over the next week we learnt that nearly 200 people had died as the fires had spread to fast people didn't have the chance to leave the towns in time. There was a lot of fundraising going on so we donated all our tips for the week at work to the appeal which was about $800.
On the last few days of our stay in Melbourne we decided we couldn't leave without seeing the great ocean road. So me, Ady and Emily rented out a car for the day. We got a free upgrade which was great and ended up with a 4x4. The Great Ocean Road is basically a long coastal drive along the southern part of Australia and runs almost to Adelaide. Our first stop was at one of the world's best surfing beaches in Australia. After we watched some of the surfers we carried on driving taking in the amazing views of the ocean. We stopped for our packed lunch at a nice spot although it was a little bit cold and windy then set off on the road again up to the twelve apostles which are some famous rock formations. On the way we decided to take a look at a lighthouse which was off the beat-n-track a bit. When we got there we were made up to discover it had been on a program called round the twist which was a kids program when we were all young which made our day!

We then drove up to the twelve apostles although there's only about 6 left now! It was a great spot to get some great pictures and we stayed for about half an hour before hitting the road back to Melbourne.

The Next day it was time to leave all our friends in Melbourne and head back to Sydney before getting our flight to Shanghai-the last part of our travelling journey!