Day 74 (19 August): Urban Markets
I explored a bunch of Melbourne's neighborhoods before heading to the airport for a flight to Christchurch, New Zealand. I started out by checking out the Victoria Market which is a large covered famer's market with other merchants too. I then saw a number of Melbournes sights in and around its flat, grid-like CBD (or Central Business District) including the Shopping Arcade, the Flinders Street Station (Austalia's busiest train station, although by world standards not very busy), Federation Square (a modern arts complex with some interesting architecture), Rowing Boathouses along the Yarra River, Chinatown, and the state of Victoria's parliment house.
Observations:
1) Preservation of Old Buildings. Melbourne has done a very good job of this while also having some of the nicest modern architecure I've seen. Doing so makes cities a lot more pleasant even if they don't have a lot of history (which Melbourne doesn't.)
2) Rich countries other than the US also have markets as I saw at the Victoria Market. In many ways it was like a very upscale, cleaner, and more organized version of the type of thing you expect to find more in third-world countries.
3) Don't lock your keys in your rental car! I did this today which meant a round-trip (read as expensive as two days of renting the car) taxi ride out to the airport to get a master key so I could get them out. It also almost made me miss my flight.
4) Immigrants to Australia. The upside of the taxi ride to the aiport was that I had an interesting conversation with the taxi driver who immigrated from China under some sort of assylum type arrangement after having been a student who participated in the Tianmen Square incident in 1989. He said that immigrant life in Australia's pretty good but noted a bit of racism (which he actualy though might have been brought about by the Chinese Community in Melbourne as many of them refused to learn English as they could get by in his neighborhood speaking Mandrin.)
Observations:
1) Preservation of Old Buildings. Melbourne has done a very good job of this while also having some of the nicest modern architecure I've seen. Doing so makes cities a lot more pleasant even if they don't have a lot of history (which Melbourne doesn't.)
2) Rich countries other than the US also have markets as I saw at the Victoria Market. In many ways it was like a very upscale, cleaner, and more organized version of the type of thing you expect to find more in third-world countries.
3) Don't lock your keys in your rental car! I did this today which meant a round-trip (read as expensive as two days of renting the car) taxi ride out to the airport to get a master key so I could get them out. It also almost made me miss my flight.
4) Immigrants to Australia. The upside of the taxi ride to the aiport was that I had an interesting conversation with the taxi driver who immigrated from China under some sort of assylum type arrangement after having been a student who participated in the Tianmen Square incident in 1989. He said that immigrant life in Australia's pretty good but noted a bit of racism (which he actualy though might have been brought about by the Chinese Community in Melbourne as many of them refused to learn English as they could get by in his neighborhood speaking Mandrin.)
posted by Traveling Brian at 4:23 PM
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