On Saturday, I forsook my favourite way to spend the first morning of the weekend (sleeping in) in exchange for a trip to the airport. And unlike most of my trips to the airport which involve purchase orders / fixing broken equipment / and invoices, this one involved me being a customer. We were bound for Melbourne to see a comedian who I like from the UK!
He doesn’t get out here much and had announced a tour that was for Sydney and Melbourne only, and since Sydney is a massive shxthole that left Melbourne as the only way to see him this tour. So Erin did a lovely thoughtful thing and organised a weekend away to see him. In the ultimate bit of champagne comedy, a week after the flights and hotel was booked he announced he was adding Brisbane to his tour. What a funny guy.
We left the puppies in the care of Judy and headed off on our new favourite airline Rex Airlines who have so far never cancelled a flight on either of us. Highly recommended!
This is day one… I’ll do day two when I remember.
This is our plane. There are many like it, but this one was ours. We flew with REX (Regional Express I think?) and I gotta say they were really good.
We could see our house from here! …. I’m actually serious, our house is literally in this photo. How exciting. It’s like Google Earth, but IRL.
Because Erin has a gambling problem, she bet on us being allowed to go in to business class or something I didn’t really understand the process. But it worked! So we got to board in front of all the poor people, and got brought special snacks, and had single use glass jars full of tomato sauce. When we had finished our meal (shephards pie, thanks for asking) we just threw our rubbish out the window because that’s what you do when you’re rich
Once the plane landed we opted for an Uber from the airport because it was literally cheaper than catching the bus. What’s with that? Skybus was $24 one way per person ($48 total), Uber was $36 and went straight to our door. How is it cheaper to have someone drive a dedicated vehicle just for us compared to a busload of people? Stupid is what it is. Also we had to ride in a Tesla which after coming from our BYD Seal was such a downgrade 
Last time we were in Melbourne, we stopped at the Royal Melbourne and had a parmi (or as the locals incorrectly refer to it – a “parma”), and I wanted to relive the experience because it was so great last time. This time… not so great. Don’t meet your heroes kids.
After the parmi, we had height withdrawals so headed skyward – this time in a building instead of a plane though. In a nutshell, Skytower is a fancy and expensive way of going up a tall building. No matter how you dress it up as a tourist attraction, at the end of the day you’re essentially just doing what Bob in Accounts does on the daily in the building next door. Good for you, Bob. Could NOT see our house from here. Possibly if we lived in the middle of the Melbourne CBD we could have.
This is apparently a famous football stadium where some spectacularly mid female artists sang some songs recently, and another one that’s probably famous too.
After the dizzying heights of the Skytower, we went a little lower and hopped on the rather grandiosely named Yarra Princess which was effectively a covered grain barge with some office chairs in the middle. We had originally planned to the opposite way to see the wetlands and what not, but got talked in to going on the Docklands cruise instead. One thing I learned on this cruise is that people won’t stfu when someone is trying to do things like explain what we’re passing, the history of the area we’re floating past, and things like where the lifejackets are stored in case we sink. I did, however, learn that the Docklands is currently being converted in to housing at a prestigous rate which is going to be expensive as buggery to live in I reckon.
After our cruise, we’d had just about enough of kids in public places so headed off to the real reason we were in Melbourne – to see my favourite comedian! He was in the theatre next to the place Urthboy was playing a gig. The demographics were certainly different. Daniel Kitson doesn’t come to Australia all that often, so when he announced he was headed this way but only for Sydney and Melbourne Erin sneakily surprised me with a ticket to his show and also a way to get there (… the plane trip). The impact of this amazing present was reduced slightly by the fact a week later he announced he was going to be doing Brisbane too… lol…. But hey, you can’t do a Yarra River Cruise or go up a tall building in Brisbane, can you? So still worth the trip, and I’ll see the bloke twice no worries about that.
Since this is technically quite the spoiler, I have censored it. To be honest even if I described in great detail the show from start to finish it would still be entertaining as beggary to see Mr Kitson perform it. Dudes hilarious. He could read the dictionary and it would probably be funny.
Ahh, ballet
Stereotypes of Melbourne – its a tram! Apparently we used to have them in Brisbane too, but thanks to a rather stupid decision by Clem Jones (among others) they were removed. And now they’re back in pog form as the Brisbane Metro, which is just a bus. That drives around as if it was a tram. Classic.
This is in the middle of what is basically a mall I guess, and already down a couple of flights of stairs. I gotta say this Lime Scooter rider was dedicated to get this far.
By 8:30pm at night, most dinner places were shut (which seemed weird given we were at Southbank (no relation) which is like right in the middle of the city??) but this Hophaus joint had a few minutes left on the clock so we ducked in and had some amazing snacks. This was beef cheek ragu I think? Despite the absolutely pretentious naming scheme of the joint I’d definitely recommend it for a snack. Also they had Pimms, and it would be rude not to have a jug of that when its on offer so I did.
After my jug of Pimms, I needed a little lay down so it was off to the hotel to work on tomorrows hangover. In the ultimate betrayal, I was supplied with little pillows! AGAIN! In my own country! This is easily the worst part of hotel life. How do they even find this ant pillows? Anyway, on that sour note it was the end of day 1.
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