Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Weekend Get Away

 My dear friend and I took a spur of the moment trip to Melbourne, my home town, to see our favourite football team Hawthorn play at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
 We stayed at the Travelodge, which is a nice business hotel in the city.


My friend had never been to Melbourne before. There are many beautiful old buildings.


 
This is Flinders Street train station, a popular place to meet friends under the clocks out front.

 
From here, we walked to the MCG along the Yarra River. On my last day of high school, my friends and I (and half of all the year 12 students in Melbourne) went to the banks of the Yarra to "celebrate". You can imagine what happened there. Also had several barbeques with uni friends there.


St Paul's Cathedral.


 

This is the MCG - the main sports stadium in Melbourne.

A statue of Leigh Matthews, who was a legendary player for my team Hawthorn.




 My team in action. We won by 50 points!


 
Photo: Another solid performance by the boys today.

Great team effort as we remain in top spot on the ladder.
We had so much fun, yelling abuse at the umpires and screaming when we scored a goal. Very unlady like I know, but it's difficult to control your emotions when at the football. We dressed head to toe in our team's colours. I made us great big ponchos from fleece, which even though made us look like fools, kept us really warm - it's was very cold all weekend. We also had a day off from low carbing, eating jam doughnuts, meat pies, sandwiches and chips.

I then took my friend to an old uni haunt of mine, a pizza place in Lygon St, Carlton. Yep, more carbs and wine! We also ate large amounts of chocolate, as we happened to find a chocolate shop near the hotel.

Then, I showed my friend my old uni, which is now a very run down empty building. It was once Lincoln Institute of Health Sciences, but it has since merged with another uni with a real campus. Lincoln was basically a hotch potch of various old buildings converted into classrooms just outside the centre of the city.  Our place to relax was the adjacent park which we shared with homeless people.

Still in operation, is this brothel which was situated next door to the department where my husband studied. There was also a brothel upstairs above my college department. As crappy as it was, it was the most highly sort after college. Don't know how I got accepted then!

Lunch was more carbs in the form of yum cha in Chinatown.  I wanted to eat at Killeney Kopitiam, which is supposed to be the same as the original one in Killeney Road, Singapore. But it was closed.  What sort of restaurant in Chinatown closes on a Sunday when all the Asians like to go out for lunch? I was quite looking forward to kaya toast and roti prata. After stuffing ourselves with dim sum, we went power shopping at H & M, Zara and Uniqlo as we do not have these stores where we live. Had to really stuff all my purchases into my tiny suitcase.
 
And just because we hadn't already eaten enough sugar, we topped off the day with cupcakes! Oh wow, did our digestive system pay for it the next day.

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