Hey, everyone--Sorry for the long silence, but I managed to catch the dreaded Sydney flu and was laid up for a week. So, not much to report from these past few days (other than Australian Idol has started its fifth season). But I do have some catching up to do posting pics from past weeks, so here are some from my trip to Melbourne three weeks ago. I was there for the AMSA (Australian Marine Sciences Association) conference.
Apparently it's common knowledge here in Sydney that Melbourne has terrible weather in the winters. And it was mostly cold and rainy but the weekend wasn't bad and in Melbourne they were a lot more pragmatic about the weather: "If you don't like it, wait 5 minutes." Which turned out to be true. Most days we cycled through about 3 season's worth of weather.
The conference was held at the University of Melbourne, and our group stayed on campus, at Trinity College. A really picturesque setting, aside from the modern yellow block of a building we stayed in. My favorite thing on campus were the drainpipes on a building close to Trinity-- they were former Prof's heads!
(OK, not the actual heads of former profs-- I think tenure probably protects you from that kind of treatment-- but you get what I mean).
Melbourne itself is a really neat town, with a very different flavor from Sydney. Definitely European, and near the university was a strip full of really good Italian restaurants-- I was a happy camper breakfast, lunch and dinner. My last day I made sure to stop at Brunetti's, a really famous pastry place. I had to get the combination plate and try a little bit of everything.
On the last night of the conference we had dinner at the Melbourne aquarium, which was great! Lots of neat stuff, including jellyfish, which are always one of my favorite things to see.
But I was a little disappointed that we didn't get any seafood for dinner. ;)
I was also lucky enough to snag an invitation from one of the students at Melbourne to go wine tasting on Saturday after the conference was over. The Yarra Valley is just about an hour outside of Melbourne, really picturesque (not too different from Northern California) and well known for Pinot Noir, though their Pinot tends toward the lighter, European style. Before heading for the wine country, we fueled up with a big farmer's breakfast at the Collingwood Children's Farm, an urban farm, petting zoo and organic garden market all rolled into one, only minutes away from the University.
Then it was off into the rolling hills of the Yarra Valley, where we managed to hit a healthy handful of wineries, including Chandon (famous for its sparkling wines, but really a place to stop for the scenery more than the wine-- like Ferrari Carrano in Sonoma), The Step, an urban winery where they make Innocent Bystander wines, young and funky, and De Bortoli, a more traditional winery where I picked up a bottle of port described as "sticky pudding in a glass." All in all a really satisfying week!
