Melbourne Centre (not Center)

- I hate it. It's just like Stuttgart with way more people.

Stuttgart doesn't have trams any more but Melbourne does.

I don't hate Melbourne like Diana does but I predictably don't like it as much as people expect someone to do. In order to understand this, you must also know that I don't like metropolitan cities at all. I didn't like Athens, Berlin, Munich, Paris and so on. With some kind of inverse logic, Australians assume that we like Melbourne because it is the city that is most like a European city. The thing is, we left Europe for a reason.

We arrived at the same time as the Chinese New Year. So there were lots of celebrations.

In my mind Perth is something like a big village and Melbourne is the real deal. Culture, art, fashion, people who put in a lot of effort in looking effortlessly cool, more noise, more garbage on the streets, less friendliness. Also cold in the summer just like in good old Germany with 9°C in the night in what is the equivalent of August here.

More celebrations at the South Bank.

There are lots of museums and art galleries here and even when I was impressed by how many types of restaurants Perth has, Melbourne is absolutely overwhelming. If it is important to you to try different things to eat regularily, then this is paradise. Your options are endless and of course there is lots of quality stuff. We ate a lot of burgers and visited the Australien Centre of the Moving Image. Two things happened there. Diana didn't have any connection at all to this stuff and was bored. I already knew most the stuff there and ... was bored as well.

People watching the tennis finale.

Because of the Chinese New Year we saw dancing dragons. There was also the Australien Open tennis tournament which was projected on big screens around the stadium. We visited some parks which was nice. We visited different neighbourhoods. If you want to live in Melbourne there is apparently a wider choice on the kind of home you can live in. You got the typical Australian one-family homes. You got modern apartments in very very tall or smaller buildings. You got Victorian style homes (I think). But at least at the places we have been there is less room compared to what we have seen before.

As opposed to Stuttgart, Melbourne knows how to make a walk next to the river shine.

What else did we do? We visited the Night Market. It had the best gyros I have ever tasted in Australia (it was the only one that tasted good) and the people there spoke the best Greek (they were the only Greeks I have seen that speak Greek). I went to a gyros restaurant a couple of days later and the people selling and serving were exclusively Chinese. The Greeks here are obviously living the dream if they are able to outsource Greek restaurants.

The Night Market opened late but it wasn't quite night yet. The fortune tellers were the best part.

In the next episode we will talk about the beach. Or the next base. Haven't decided yet.