Melbourne City Tour and Window Shopping

City view from the balcony of the Shrine of Remembrance

The boys and I were off on our own bright and early for our city tour.  It was gray and rainy and on our whole big coach bus, there were only a total of six passengers.  We drove around in circles with the very kind and hugely enthusiastic bus driver/tour guide.  Rule #1 in Melbourne:  If you live here, you sincerely love the city, and take a lot of pride in its culture, food, cityscape.  I am interested to see what Rule #1 is when we get to Sydney.

By driving around in circles, we did get a pretty good idea of the neighborhoods and easy to navigate city center.  We were permitted to get off the bus twice.  The first time was to see Capt. Cook's cottage.  It has been bought and moved here and placed in one of Melbourne's many city gardens.  Capt. Cook probably never lived in it-- but his parents did.  The cottage garden was particularly nice in the rain.  The second time we were permitted off the bus was to visit the Shrine of Remembrance.  This was affecting.  Remembrance Day is celebrated on the traditional Armistice Day, just like Veteran's Day in the States.  The Shrine is designed so that at 11am on November 11th, the sun shines directly down a shaft into a crypt to light the memorial which is my second photo above.

Container ships being loaded in Victoria Harbour

After our bus tour, we walked to our river tour.  We boarded a pretty small boat and got to see some of Melbourne from the Yarra River. We had a colorful boat pilot who was full of impartial political commentary. 
One example:  How can the politicians spend tens of thousands of dollars for flags to decorate a bridge, when there are homeless people who live under the bridge?  We did see his point.

Both John Roy and I were totally fascinated with the view of the container ships from the water.  They are massive, and being loaded with huge cranes.  The longshoremen who work the cranes earn quite a salary-- those in training make over $90,000 AUS a year.  They are only permitted to work the crane for one hour out of their shift.  They load the container to "within a centimeter" of precision.  It would be a disaster at sea for the cargo to shift even a bit.  We're wondering what a crane operator does for the rest of the shift?  Plan the load?  Paperwork?  Tea and biscuits?  We also learned that it is nearly impossible to get this work unless you have a family member or close friend who can put a word in for you.  The waiting list for training is four years.  Operating the crane seems like good work for a video game trained generation.  It is sort of like robot surgery on the opposite size scale.

I haven't mentioned what fascinated Alan.  It was his book.  He read the whole time on both tours.  Then he worried about how he was going to manage without the third book in the series.  So, after our tours, we headed towards lunch and a bookshop.  Lunch was in Chinatown, where we somehow ended up eating Japanese.  We got directions to a bookstore and Alan has the last three books in the Percy Jackson series so he doesn't have to be afraid of getting caught without a volume for the rest of the trip.  I hope.

Visitors to Melbourne are supposed to "shop 'til you drop," and we at least window shopped until we dropped for the rest of the afternoon.  The charm of the city is that it has arcades.  Melbourne has really wide streets--wide enough for a horse and dray to make a U-turn.  In spite of this planning, it also had very muddy and refuse clogged streets in those days.  The arcades were built like 19th century malls to keep ladies out of the muddy streets.  You can spontaneously turn down one and find dozens of little shops, and wind your way through to the other side of the block.  Laneways (ie. alleys) also can carry this pleasure of discovery and adventure.  The only trouble is. the merchandise we saw today was very expensive.  Alan came out of his book while we were walking, and he really liked the fashion he saw. He had sticker shock, though, and asked, "Don't they have a store like Target?" If they do, we didn't see it where we were today. 

JR got sick of the stores so we sent him back to the hotel on his own.  He got lost and had a good time discovering his way back.  He just told me he is proud of himself for this adventure.  I think its pretty cool that he did well with his free-range time.

St. Michael's Church:  I just thought it was pretty.

Mark had a good day too. I was fascinated by the news from the slick, short newspaper the conference publishes everyday.  An attention getting headline this morning:  "Science and religion agree- again...botany drops Latin."  It has taken 25 years of discussion, but new species, while still being named in Latin, will no longer have to have their technical descriptions in Latin when published.  Even more interesting to me:  It will also be acceptable to have the publication of a new species be in a paper that is is only electronic.  Some journals are only e-copies, and never paper.  By expanding the acceptable methods, the naming of new species will speed up, and this is important when the earth is facing a mass extinction.  The new policy will also level the playing field for botanists from developing countries where page charges plus the Latin were making publication very difficult.  So, in 2012, botanists are modernizing.  There is an aspect of botany that has a clear archival bend, considering the care that is taken to preserve specimens in herbaria.  Having botanists decide that electronic archives are safe for the written word is very significant.

We wandered out for a nice dinner and shared the day's adventures with each other.  It was rather refreshing to have two versions of the day--three if you count JR's adventures getting lost.  I am trying very hard to get Alan to eat something green.  I think he had a slice of kiwi from Mark's dessert garnish...not quite what I was aiming for, but tomorrow is a new day!