Australia - Melbourne - Capitalizing on the Cultural Capital

There is a rather fierce and long-standing rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne as to which city constitutes Australia's cultural capital (Sorry, Brisbane, you haven't quite caught up with the big boys yet...). After sampling both, Mehr and I concur and award the title to Melbourne, or as the locals pronounce it, Mell-bin. Sydney has lots going for it but it's all flash and money, whereas Melbourne has lots of personality and character.

Even if we hadn't gone into a single museum or gallery, we could have kept ourselves entertained all week wandering in and out of the many many laneways and alleys of the CBD (Sidenote: whenever we say we're going/staying 'downtown', people stare at us and wonder where that is and point out there is no 'uptown' so why would there be a 'downtown'. Here the city centre is called the central business district, hence CBD).

Melbourne is definitely very European in that respect. There are tons of cafes, restaurants and small venue clubs to be found on these streets and you never know what you're going to find.



Tastiest laneway was Degraves, which featured both Spanish cafe Lorca with desayunos completos harking back to my South America days and unnamed Middle Eastern place with wicked food. Funniest discovery was a creperie that self described as "arrogantly French" on Hardware Lane. Runner up was "Bogan Bingo" at one of the bars downtown. Bogan is a term describing an individual akin to a hick with a dash of trailer trash.

However, we did hit up the galleries and museums, most of which were free with our student IDs from U of O. At the excellent Immigration Museum, we learned about all the ways Australia tried to keep out all immigrants except for Brits over the years, notably the Dictation Test which once kept out an immigrant who spoke four European languages by requiring him to do the test in Gaelic. Best sentence in the whole tour: "Batman signs 'treaties' with Aboriginal leaders, giving him 250,00 ha of land." Who knew the Caped Crusader exploited indigenous groups when he wasn't rescuing Gotham from the baddies? There is even a Batman treaty. No joke.

We then headed over to Federation Square, the centre, not the middle of Melbourne.



Very cool buildings and home to multiple museums and galleries. We arrived to a rally for the Australia Socceroos (actual team name) who were competing that night against Japan on the way to the FIFA World Cup. So random. The whole team was there signing autographs and giving typical comments such as how they would give 137% this time around. Athletes are not known for their charismatic public speaking.



We did an art afternoon (yay free activities) and took in both the Ian Potter Centre, the only exclusively Australian art gallery, and its parent, the National Gallery of Victoria, to see the touring Dali exhibition, Liquid Desire. Dali was excellent, though very graphic at times. Mehr wandered into a video he coproduced called the Andalusian Dog where a woman's eyeball is sliced open. I thankfully missed that room and wandered into Destino, a coproduced animated film short between Dali and Walt Disney which was stunning. Who knew they hung out? This exhibit also gave me the most hilarious overheard conversation of the week. In his later years, Dali was recognized as and self referred as the saviour of modern art. Blonde girl in front of me reads this caption and comments as follows: "Oh my gawd... this guy is like the Kanye West of his time." I had to muffle my tears of laughter. Salvador Dali... just like Kanye West. Huge ego, most collaborative work, no shelf life of his work. Right... I still tear up thinking about it. That girl made my day.



We also checked out the Melbourne Museum, where I experienced a silent but crippling phobia-induced panic attack when I accidentally wandered into the insect exhibit where the LIVE spiders of my Discovery Channel special nightmares reside. In one area alone I was surrounded simultaneously by the venomous Sydney funnel webs, the redback/black widow, the whitetail and several massive tarantulas. By surrounded I mean they were encased in glass and dirt enclosures on the walls, but that was WAY too close for me. DID I MENTION THEY WERE ALIVE?! Multiple coronaries later, I stumbled into the dinosaur hall and began a long recovery process by delighting in the pterodactyl skeletons.

The rest of the week was spent kicking around St Kilda, the trendy suburb near Melbourne's best beach. We wandered up and down the Esplanade and Acland St, where funky shops and yummy cafes ruled. This week has also been Mehr's first major foray into backpacker hostel living and getting her feet wet has certainly been interesting. She didn't care for our first hostel at Greenhouse Backpackers in the CBD, which smelled a bit like feet but was clean and quiet and had free internet. Her opinion of it greatly improved with the contrast to our next hostel Base St Kilda, a boutique-y spot that caters way too much to drunk 18 yr old backpackers, which she thoroughly disliked. Our next choice, the Cooee hostel in St Kilda has won the day. It was clean, quiet, great showers, and good common spaces with free internet. She has also encountered some of the usual suspects of hostel living, such as Sleeps Nearly Naked Guy and Guitar Playing Guy. She did not care for either of them. We both look forward to Asia where we can get away from residence dorm accommodations and into beach bungalows... and more importantly ditch our sweaters!