Melbourne

Melbourne by day

Melbourne by night

Hi There,

To celebrate turning 40 this year, two of my best friends from High School and I decided to celebrate with a trip to Melbourne, Australia last weekend.

Boy was it fun!  It was lovely to spend time with great friends and talk and laugh without any commitments or interruptions.  The sleep-ins were lovely too!

I have been to Melbourne before but this time I got to shop!  OH how we shopped!  One of the friends I went with is an expert shopper. If there was a degree available in it she would graduate with the highest of honours.   We tried to have a rule to only go into the shops that weren't in New Zealand.  We failed. 

Another delicious thing about the trip was the weather it was warm.  Well 25-26 degrees is pretty warm for winters temperature. I had to drag my winter arms into the sunshine.  I think they went into shock!

St Kilda

When we weren't shopping we were eating.  We found neat places to eat. Lygon Street for Italian...yummo!...St Kilda for sunshine and wine... Riverside restaurant for tapas... Roof top garden bar for bubbles...I could go on.  

One place I liked was a little coffee house that does the most amazing sweet treats.  I really wanted to take a photo of the inside but felt a little foolish so I snuck a snap of my stash instead...

Sweet treats to keep me going

And when I turned around this is the view I saw.  Beautiful.  I love old churches and houses.  Well anything old with some history I love.

Look at that gorgeous blue sky

Another exciting thing I dragged my two friends to was the Monet Exhibition.  Swoon...

He and the Impressionists have to be one of my favourite artists/movements.  I love how they didn't want to conform to the normal way, or the perceived way of painting instead opting for the outdoors where they experimented with colour, light and subjects and produced some amazing works of art.  

Even though we had to line up for awhile, my back was KILLING me and there were LOADS of people it was so worth it.  Just to see the brush strokes on the canvas, the colours he used and how he made that canvas come to life was quite overwhelming.  I know it may sound crazy, but just being there knowing he once stood in-front of that canvas and painted for days on end to get an image I was now seeing was quite...amazing really.  Oh my poor friends!  Sigh.

PixCell-Red Deer by Kohei Nawa

Another thing I liked, silly really was the signs for the trams.  WHY?? Not sure.  Maybe they tell a story of where we went and what we saw.  Anyway, I liked them.

On our many walks around town we found this awesome shop called T2 which sold nothing but...tea.  Really you say, yeap!  My kind of cool place.

I guzzled down some pomegranate and apple delicious tea and oohhed and ahhhed over the teapots...I LOVE TEAPOTS!  I resisted the urge to buy one for my teapot collection.  But they were sooo pretty.

So after four days of mammoth shopping, walking and eating ourselves silly we reluctantly dragged our weary bodies back to NZ ...to the rain, early morning starts, school runs, after school activities and so on...Sigh...I love holidays...till next time...

Lxx