Hello again and happy holidays! For the last month, we have been living in a small beach town called South West Rocks, in the state of New South Wales. I will speak more to our lives here for the last month in my next post, but earlier in December, we took a small quick trip-within-a-trip to Melbourne to check out the city. We will be passing through the outskirts of Melbourne and surrounding sights on our upcoming road trip, so we wanted to focus on the city-based aspects of the area during this trip. We got up to quite a bit in those few days, and as such, here is a separate post about our travels.

We found a good return flight from our nearest airport, Port Macquarie, through the airline Bonza. It is Australia’s newest budget airline, so was very no-frills and overall a great experience. Something fun about this airline that I hadn’t seen before was that they had no food or drinks cart going down the aisle during the flight, even to offer items for purchase. Instead, if you wanted anything you would order it from an app, and the staff would deliver it to your seat on a tray. They had some fun menu options such as banana bread waffles and the prices were very reasonable.

Unfortunately, on the day we were leaving for Melbourne, all of the flights going into and coming out of the airport got majorly delayed or cancelled due to fog. While we were a little disappointed that our flight was delayed, we were thankful that it wasn’t cancelled, as we saw on the Melbourne airport website that many were cancelled that day. We also got a lot of notice about the flight delay, so were able to look around Port Macquarie instead of sitting and waiting at the airport. We arrived in Melbourne late on our first night, so we prioritized getting to our accommodation and getting a good rest for the next day.

On our first full day in Melbourne, we first ventured to the Queen Victoria Market, which is a giant indoor market divided into sections based on what vendors were selling. We first went to the food hall to grab some breakfast and so I could have a coffee. The coffee, as expected, was delicious, and George was happy to get us some Turkish gozleme (flatbread with filling) that he had been looking forward to since we had booked our trip to Melbourne. We spent time after our food wandering the market space, which offered everything from fresh cheese to various groceries to any merchandise-type item that you could buy.

After exploring the market, we hopped on the tram to head down to the St. Kilda neighbourhood. St. Kilda is known for being one of the beach suburbs, and we walked along the waterfront area, which sort of reminded me of Vancouver beachfront areas (minus the mountains in the background).

We then headed for lunch back in the CBD (central business district), where we had tasty udon at a local restaurant. We have been missing authentic Asian-style food, so it was a nice lunch that reminded us of home. There is definitely a huge Asian influence and presence in Melbourne, much more than we have seen in any of the other cities in Australia we have visited. I can understand why people say that Melbourne reminds them of Vancouver (or vice versa) for this reason alone.

After lunch, we took the tram into the neighbourhood of Fitzroy, which is known for being a trendy and hipster neighbourhood. We enjoyed walking down the main road and taking a look at some very niche shops. Some examples of their quirkiness included a shop that specialized in pitchforks, and another selling artisan goods that was also home to two resident cats. Fitzroy was lovely, though I think more gentrified than when it gained its prominence.

Early that evening, after heading back to our accommodation to get changed and ready for the evening, we took the train to the neighbourhood of South Yarra. We were headed in this direction because we managed to get tickets to be in the studio audience for a TV show! The show we were watching was called “The Project” and it is shown on Australia’s Channel 10. It is an interesting show that covers serious news stories but also has some lighter stories and banter, hence the need for the studio audience that we were a part of.

Upon entering the studio area, we underwent a security check and had to lock our bags away since we weren’t allowed to bring anything bulky with us into the studio. We were allowed to keep our phones and wallets, as long as they were turned off. We were led to a holding room with tables and chairs, where the coordinator greeted us. We had recently watched The Morning Show (on Apple TV) and were especially excited about the entire experience because it felt like we were behind the scenes of that series. The coordinator also had an uncanny resemblance to Chip on the show.

There were about ten of us there to be in the studio audience, which the coordinator said was on the lower side (they usually had an audience of 20-30). There was a table of snacks in the holding room that we were told we were welcome to eat while the coordinator explained the rules. Basically, we had to clap and make noise when he signaled us, and otherwise encouraged us to laugh loudly whenever it appeared that the presenters were trying to be humorous. We were instructed to cheer louder and longer than we thought was appropriate, and laugh loudly and often. Everything got picked up on sensitive microphones.

After a couple of cheer and laugh practices, we were led into the studio, where the presenters were getting their makeup touched up before the show started. We were told to stay in our seats and only make noise when we were supposed to.

Watching the show from this perspective was so much fun, and we learned a few things that we didn’t realize happened during the making of a live TV show. An example was that many of the interviews where the presenter was in the studio and the interviewee was on a video feed were actually filmed in advance. The presenter would open the segment live, say hello and how are you to the interviewee, then the pre-recorded segment would roll. On TV, however, it would look like it was all happening live, since the presenter was in the studio and wearing the same clothes when they had done the interview earlier. The coordinator told us they often did this if there were any legal implications that needed to be looked into before airing, or if the interviewees weren’t media trained and the segment required some refining or editing. The presenters all came down to talk to us at the end of the show, which was a nice touch.

We got out of the filming quite late for dinner, so we made our way back into the CBD and had a drink at a rooftop bar. One issue with Melbourne that we ran into is that there seems to be limited food options after the main dinner hour, so we grabbed a casual dinner in a bar that was still serving food that night.

The next morning, we made our way to another market hall, this one called the South Melbourne Market. We had some delicious Lebanese food for breakfast before walking around and exploring this hall. This market had more goods and was a bit more formal in terms of the businesses that existed there in comparison to the Queen Victoria Market.

After breakfast, we took the tram to the National Gallery of Victoria to see the Triennial Exhibition. We spent a few hours at the gallery and really enjoyed seeing the different exhibits. Some highlights included a giant art piece of quilted cloth depicting the impacts of increased global demand on the avocado market, a video collaboration exhibit about megacities, and a one-woman video piece where she dressed up and depicted hundreds of emojis with her outfits, body shapes, and facial expressions.

When we were finished at the gallery, we walked over the bridge into the CBD and had vegetarian thali for lunch. We wandered through the streets according to a street art guided walk that we had found online, checked out another rooftop bar, then grabbed a happy hour drink before getting ready for dinner.

Our dinner location was in one of the neighbourhoods slightly farther from the CBD of Melbourne, called 1800 Lasagne. Apparently, the restaurant started during the pandemic when a man began offering a Lasagne delivery service that was so successful that he turned it into a full restaurant. We had the most delicious gnocchi, and the lasagna was absolutely out of this world!

We decided to check out a couple of bars on our way back to our accommodation. First, we saw online that a pub in Fitzroy offered a free comedy night that evening, so we went there. Little did we know, it was much more low-key than we had anticipated and we ended up being the only audience members besides the other comedians performing. It was fun, and we decided to stay for the whole show (out of obligation and support for the comedians). There was definitely a range in quality of each performance, but we had a ton of fun regardless. We stopped at a second bar in Fitzroy for our final drink of the evening and enjoyed people watching and taking in the sights and sounds of the neighbourhood at night.

Our flight was in the early afternoon, so we woke up the next morning, packed up, and headed to the airport. Melbourne has a very easy (but expensive) bus service that takes you directly from the centre of town to the airport, which we were happy to utilize. We were happy to have no delays or interruptions to our flight home, and were even greeted by the Bonza CEO when we were getting on the plane.

Melbourne is a very cool city and there is a lot to do and see there. While I understand why many people compare it to Vancouver, I personally felt that it reminded me more of Toronto when thinking of cities that it was similar to. We had jam-packed days but really felt that we had made the most of what this fantastic city had to offer!