Ex-Trip - Day 1+2

A hello to you from Melbourne, where I've been holidaying in a heatwave.
In case you're wondering what Ex-Trip means, it means Extreme Trip. I didn't make up the name, I just called it the trip, but Henry decided that it had to have some sort of cooler name.


DAY 1 - Monday 20th
I got up early to finish last minute packing, before Bob arrived to hitch a lift to the airport. We caught a plane to Melbourne, and then took a taxi through from Melbourne Airport to our crash-place, the home of Henry's friend Jits (look back several posts - he was there with us the last time I went down to Bob's shack). We ended up going to the wrong house - the house number was 19A, not 19, and what was worse was that they both had the same coloured fence. We ended up waiting out there for awhile before Jits showed up, because his housemates weren't home, nor was he.
So then Jits rocks up, wearing a long-sleeve shirt and a sweater. In 36 degree celsius heat. He claims that the weather tricked him. Anyways, we chuck our stuff inside, before heading off to catch a tram to meet Henry at his (and several other people's) castle, Janet Clarke Hall (aka JCH). We go up to meet him, and then he tries to introduce me to Amy, but she isn't in.
After Henry gave us a tour of his dorms, we decide to hit Melbourne Central for lunch, and go for the very Melbourne delight of Hungry Jacks. In a way it was interesting to eat fast food that you had been having for the past two or three days in a different city. After lunch we hitched a train out to this science centre called Scienceworks, which seemed like what the Investigator Science Centre in Adelaide if it had a lot more people coming. On the way there, we were chatting loudly amongst ourselves and I managed to elicit several weird looks from this old woman who sat near us on the train - my outburst of "I'm not marrying some random girl just because I have a game she wants" elicited a real strange look. At the center, the highlight involved us coming into the big toy city designed for small children and having a play around and just laughing at ourselves looking so weird in a section intended for 3-8 year olds. I will have to upload this particularly hilarious video of Henry and myself dropping foam bricks on Jits' head. We were even approached by a film crew to appear in their promotional DVD, but unfortunately, we'll probably only appear in the deleted scenes section.

We take the train back to JCH, and it is here that I meet Amy, one of the infamous "anime girls" Henry is always telling me about, and the infamous Thrower of the Object of Rage. I know she reads this blog, so I'll be nice :p. She seems to be very photogenic - I wasn't expecting what I saw, namely less oestrogen-fuelled throwing of objects. But then, I suppose, what do you expect when you meet someone you'd only talked to on the internet before? Speaking of which, we head out onto Lygon St, where I meet another internet friend - a fellow DM from the Internode NWN servers. Those of you from there would know him as Nemesis_22. It's amazing, really - we've been good friends for two and a half years now, and only now have we actually met each other in the flesh.
We go and have dinner at this really nice gourmet pizza place that Nemesis recommends, and then wander down towards Southbank, along the Yarra River, from Federation Square (I wish Adelaide had a place like that) towards the infamous Crown complex. We had a lot of fun while we were wandering down there - I swear, Southbank is one of the nicest places to walk along in the evening. There was also supposed to be a flame-show, but it was a hot day, so they turned off the gas.

DAY 2 - Tuesday 21st
I wake up at 6am because I had forgotten to reset my mobile alarm. I shut it off and then go back to sleep. At 8:13am, I get an SMS message from Henry telling me we have to get to Federation Square ASAP. So I have about twenty minutes to get from bed to the tram station. In the mad rush, I end up losing a contact lens to the bathroom floor (later found by the very kind Jits), and spend most of the day with one good eye and one bad eye.
Bob and I end up getting to Federation Square and meeting Henry there at about 9:15am, and get to the platform just in time for the 9:17am train to wherever it was that we were going - to take a cruise through Eastern Victoria on a train called Puffing Billy.
The train ride is relatively uneventful, but for the first half of the journey there, we're stuck in a carriage filled with Japanese tourists. Yes, the stereotype is still very much alive. We end up riding the train all the way to the end of the line, at a small town named Gemsbrook. After getting lunch from a bakery near the train station and enjoying it in a park nearby, we head for a nature trail, and end up emerging about 40 minutes later much further than from where we were before, according to the tourists' map Henry had taken from the bakery, intended for young children, I believe. We walk down the road, and then we see a mechanic's shop. As we get there, I see the sign slowly being spelled out.
SHOP
MECHANIC'S SHOP
EMERALD MECHANIC'S SHOP

Here I groan and think that we've somehow accidentally hiked to a town further back along the train route (name, surprisingly enough, Emerald), but we walk a bit further and it's
GEMSBROOK EMERALD MECHANIC'S SHOP

I breathe a sigh of relief. We board Puffing Billy and head back towards the station we had departed from that morning, all hot, tired, and sweaty. By now my right eye is getting rather irritated, I'm sneezing, and I have a blocked and runny nose (simultaneously). I remove my right contact and subsequently lose it in the Flinders St station toilets, meaning that I am now stuck with one contact lens for the rest of the week. At least today I found that I can wear one contact lens and still have good vision, even if it does get a bit weird if I look out the wrong eye.

We return to JCH for a little bit, before heading out to little Chinatown, on Little Bourke St, by tram. By this time I am most certainly impressed by Melbourne's efficient and modern public transport system, so much more efficient in some ways than Adelaide's. I mean, there are more tram stops and trams in use than buses here, and the tram stops in the city have LCD screens showing how long before each tram that stops at that stop is coming in. We go to this little Chinese place to get some dinner, and then to Borders because Bob wants a book to read. While he's browsing, Henry and myself are reading an interview that Filmink magazine does with Borat, laughing at all his responses.
We return to JCH on foot, walking through this infamous alley in Trinity College where supposedly one girl was murdered and another raped, making people so scared of going through there alone that now they appparently have CCTV cameras and guards nearby, on little golf buggies.
At the moment, I am writing this blog on Jits' computer (another big up to you, big guy), and we are departing for Sydney tomorrow, and another hot day.
Photos to follow.