Melbourne, March 25-26

View from the balcony

What a wonderful and vibrant city!  Four and a half million people call this sparkling and charming city home. We arrived to discover a sizeable modern city with a spectacular downtown skyline featuring a large number of very tall, gleaming, glass and steel skyscrapers. We took a taxi from the airport to our lodgings on the 13^th floor of the Plum Service Apartments in the Southbank area of downtown. We were pleasantly surprised to find an ultra modern furnished apartment featuring a balcony offering a postcard like view from high above downtown.

Same view from balcony, morning and night

Melbourne reminds us in many ways of a smaller Chicago. The Yarra river divides the south side of the city from the other sections and as one stands on the bridge looking up and down the river and past the multiple bridges it gave me a feeling of déjà vu as if we were standing on the Michigan Avenue bridge and looking north up the Chicago river. 

Melbourne’s downtown skyline is filled with a vast array of gleaming glass and steel skyscrapers soaring high into the air. There are multiple construction cranes sprinkled across the skyline indicating the construction of many more ultra modern buildings soon to come. This is a growing, alive and very modern thriving major city.

Flinders Train Station

The transit system in the city is superb. Melbourne has collected many vintage streetcars from various places around the world and has incorporated them into a “free loop” around the center section of the city to allow residents and visitors to travel easily and at no expense. The cars are of different ages and various colors. The insides are all wood, reminiscent of the streetcars of my early childhood in Chicago.  Many of the cars are close to a hundred years old, some older still and they add a colorful image as they clang their bells while moving throughout the city. The tracks are shared with an ultra modern metro car system that charges a nominal amount for their fare. It’s never necessary to wait for more than a few minutes to catch a ride on the next car.

We chose to take an inexpensive “around the city” tour bus that allowed us to get on and off of the busses as we chose. The tour busses stopped at sixteen different locations and ran every thirty minutes. It provided and excellent method of viewing many of the different attractions. There is so very much to see, all of it interesting.  The pictures attached will provide an overview of what we enjoyed.

The Old Melbourne Gaol (Gaol = Jail).

St. James Cathedral

The Shrine of Remembrance that honors the memory of Australian lives lost in the Great War (World War I)

View of Melbourne from The Shrine

Victorian architecture next to the Australian stock exchange

Chloe

As mid-afternoon arrived we found we were both tiring and stopped for a late lunch at the oldest pub in Melbourne, Young's and Jackson’s, in business continuously since 1861. A floor to ceiling size oil painting entitled “Chloe”, has hung on the walls of this famous establishment for more than a century. It was painted in 1875 and features a beautiful and wistful young woman gazing off into the distance as if waiting for her lover. The subject of the painting was only eighteen years old when the work was done. She suffered from unrequited love and the painting portrays that eloquently.  We were informed that in real life the young woman’s lover never returned and that she had tragically decided to end her life on her twenty first birthday by ingesting the ground up sulfur from a large quantity of match heads, a rather sad, unusual and somewhat bizarre method it would seem.