Pedestrian photo essay

Yesterday, I tried to capture some of the life and flavour of a walk around downtown Melbourne on a Friday afternoon in Autumn. Click here to run through the pics on Flickr. Go through them quickly, half-seeing them. That seems to approximate best the sense of actually walking around the city. Things happen and are over before you really see them.

I like Buskers

I'm not a fan of beggars, but I do like genuine buskers with skill, talent or just a good, entertaining idea. In Melbourne, (Australia) yesterday afternoon, we came found two genuinely interesting buskers playing in Bourke Street mall around 13:30. I gave some money to both and I've made a couple of 1 minute videos. Cities would be far more boring and less human without people like this.

Techno Didjeridoo



"New" Age Busker

Back from Melbourne

Just got back from a week in Melbourne. I hadn't been there before, so was very much looking forward to seeing a city I had heard many good things about.

I was out and around town for most of every day (and evening) which meant there wasn't any blogging going on.

Melbourne has several type of trams running up and down the main streets. The easiest on the eye were the French and German trams. The Aussie-made (Dandenong) trams looked downright ugly - painted mainly battleship grey, and the overall esthetic suggested they had been originally intended to be used in the invasion of Iraq. Stark and UGLY....made even more so by the tops of them being festooned in garish ad boards. 

Overall, Melbourne's public tranport system was excellent. For $10.10 / day each, we could go anywhere on any mode of conveyance - train, tram or bus. The services were frequent and reliable. We usually did not have to resort to a timetable as there were notice boards on most stops telling us exactly now many minutes until the next train or tram arrived. That number was rarely more than 10 minutes unless we had just missed one. Fingers crossed the new National-lead government does not kneel to the bus operaters (who have collectively made a mess of Auckland's public transport) and repeal the law giving ARTA more authority and the ability to ensure Auckland has better public transport sooner rather than later.  

Melbourne's increasingly dire water situation was rarely not in the local news. Each person is asked to try to use less than 115 litres / day. Waterless urinals in public toilets are common. Projections show Melbourne  will run out of water in 2010 while the big dealisation project underwy won't come online until 2011. That looks like being a tough year for locals unless there is a lot of rain between now and then.

Melbourne is growing rapidly, so it will be interesting to see how they reconcile the limits of resources with the desire to exploint them as through there were no limits. The whole world faces that challenge, but it looks like Melbourne will be learning the answer sooner than most. 

On the fun side, we did our best to sample the restaurants in Chapel St, Hardware Lane, Lygon St and anywhere else we found ourselves hungry. So much great food, so little time.


The service varied widely from place to place though a rule of thumb seemed to be the more Kwiis they had on the staff, the better the service.

At VONS in Hardware lane, there were no Kiwis at all and getting the (mainly European) waiting staff to pay any attention meant getting up and chasing them around the restaurant. They didn't appear to do eye contact. The calamari was like rubber and the paella was ricy muck. That was the worst one out of an otherwise very good bunch of restaurants.

I can recommend "Amigos" in Chapel St. They delivered what is probably the best chicken burrito I've ever had.

Also at the top of my list for almost everything was "Tica Tera" in Lygon St. It's a pizza place offering wide-fired pizza, excellent calamari, and good service that rated well with us. We were there in the afternoon and the Greatest Hits Aussie FM radio they were playing wasn't too my taste, but they turned it down when they noticed us looking around for a table far from the speakers. Top points for being awake....and thinking.