As the title indicates, my second day in Melbourne went much, much better than the first. To start, I enjoyed a lovely sandwich thing that Elisa brought me around 1pm, hung out in my room to strategize a bit, and then headed out. First, she introduced me to the tram system--which still slightly scares and confuses me, but only because of the left vs right thing. I'm still thinking I'm very likely to get hit by some sort of car or tram because I keep looking the wrong way every time I go to cross a street. So odd. I'm also constantly running into people because they tend to walk on the left, and people on elevators yell at me cuz you're suppoesd to idle on the left side, not the right. It's all so odd. Anywho, I bought a day pass thing and learned how to validate it and all of that lovely stuff. It's really quite a convenient system, so I'm sure I'll like it a lot once I get to know it.
Next on the agenda was my cell phone, or mobile phone as Elisa keeps telling me to call it, which actually proved to be a lot easier to go about getting then I thought. I bought the cheapest phone, some 50 dollar non-flip, non-touch, non-keyboard phone, but it does have a camera and all of that at least. Going back to texting on a number pad is going to suck, though. Oh, and their numbers are all quite confusing, like the amount of numbers in their phone numbers all vary between cells and house numbers and I don't even know the rest of the intricacies yet--something about adding a 0 or not adding a 0 or possibly adding a 61 to the start? Like I said, confusing. Anyways, it'll certainly do for now, and the prepaid bit of it doesn't seem too bad, basically I pay 30 dollars each time I want to "recharge it" and I get 200 dollars worth of credit, which is then used up in whatever intervals each minute or text costs. Speaking of which I should prolly look up those costs at some point.
After the cell phone, we went to QV, which is kind of like a mall set up, it had a food court upstairs and below a "Big W" which seems to equate nicely with Walmart. I got my trashcan, some silverware/cups/plate/bowl, hangers, and a few other things. Then we went to Woolworths or something like that across the way to get groceries, though at that point I was tired of carrying shit around and wasn't in the mood to really buy much of anything so I got the bare essentials: milk, tea, sugar cubes, apples, tim tams (amazing chocolate cookie things), honey nut cheerios, coke, and mac n cheese. Yep, I'm set. Oh, as a fun side story, it's been really interesting trying to use my card to pay for things. People don't ask you if you want to use credit or debit, they ask if you want to use savings, credit, or chequeing (yes, funny spelling and all). After many, many annoying bouts of trial and error I've finally discovered that my card will only work if I use credit and sign for it, apparently using my pin won't work. Good to know. Anywho, my arms got a lovely work out trucking all of that shit around until we trammed back to my apt to drop it all off.
Feeling about 50 pounds lighter, we went right back down my street, Swanston St, and just went exploring. She took me to a place called Melbourne Central, another kind of mall that was in a beautiful, cool building. It was filled with lots of food places and stores and things, on the lower floor was a train station, and on the highest floor was a movie theatre. I can't wait to properly explore all of the stores, I absolutely love the style of the clothes over here. OH! and they even had a little pet store where I found the cutest little puppy on earth that I was extremely tempted to buy. So sad.
After that we just kept walking down Swanston. Living in a city is so interesting, every where you go there's different restaurants and bars and cafes and stores and they're all just so interesting and unique and I want to go in all of them, and I was only on one street. So much to do... Anywho, the further down the street you go, you end up in the CBD, or central business district, which is where lots of the big skypscrapers and other shops and things are. There was one funny building that I go by a lot on the tram that has like, restaurants and shops on the ground floor, an audi dealer on the second floor, and a giant rock climbing venue with big glass windows so you can see all of the people and giant walls above that. So odd, but cool. Oh, and there's a really cool building that has a movie theatre kind of thing on the roof and bars below that, such a good idea. We walked down the street until we got to some square which I forget the name of and a bridge crossing the Yarra River until we finally decided to tram back to my place around 6 or so.
We hung out in my room, listened to music, I taught her KenKen, played with my phone a little etc. until we decided to go get some dinner. So, back to Melbourne Central we went, and I actually don't remember the place we ate at but we got burgers. It was interesting though, I ordered a "plain grilled" burger, because all of the other variaties had weird healthy things on them like carrots, avacado, beetroot, and lord knows what else. I explained to Elisa that when we want to make a burger special we put more meat on it, or bacon, not veggies. Elisa paid for my dinner, even though I yelled at her for it, it was like 30 some odd dollars for the two of us. So expensive, ugh. Also, they call ketchup "tomato relish". Weird. Oh, and instead of calories on their nutrition labels they call it "energy" and use kJ, for kilojoules. Wtf? After dinner we chatted for a bit more and then she had to head home and I managed to get myself all the way home using the trams all by myself. I was so proud. I spent the rest of the night hanging out downstairs with a bunch of people in the lounge. They were pregaming to go out to a club, but I was still under the evil influences of jetlag so I opted to stay behind and sleep.
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