Melbourne and beyond...

The journey begins. Three days in Melbourne as our first port of call. It was busy times, it seemed like we were running everywhere. We checked in at our hostel which was above a pub, where the bar and the reception desk were synonymous, and were assigned a room on the third floor, in a lift-less hostel, with our "long term trip" amount of baggage. After a sweaty, slow climb we dropped off our bags in a room full of other mystified new arrivals, as we had all been decisively issued bed numbers in a room we all now discovered was labelled with letters... There were also no clean sheets and Laura and I's chosen beds appeared to be strewn with M&M's.

Running late to meet a friend we left again, hoping things might be sorted by the time we returned. Our destination for the evening was the beautiful Astor Theatre where we were seeing three Irish short films, The Guard (in honour of it being St. Paddy's Day) and Quartet. We'd missed the first short and went in halfway through the second. It was perhaps for the best. What I'd first assumed to be Irish Gaelic we quickly deduced from the lack of subtitles was in fact English, unintelligible English accompanied by men digging a very large hole. There was something about the whole situation I found extremely amusing, but between bouts of silent, side-shaking laughter I managed to figure out that the story was in fact a loving tribute to old-fashioned peat digging. I also caught the word donkey. Laura managed to catch the words "and that's the story" before the screen faded to black. What the story really was I don't suppose we'll ever know.

The rest of our time in Melbourne was a rush of catching up with people and eating a lot of pizza (the pizza part wasn't planned, it just sort of worked out that way). But our hostel was a treasure trove of oddity. Our first night when we returned there were indeed clean sheets, our first morning there was puke in the middle of the third flight of stairs. Not that this really reflects on the hostel, they can't be held responsible for some St. Paddy's Day reveler being unable to hold their drink and lacking the drunken spatial awareness to aim slightly to the left or right. We certainly felt bad for housekeeping though. We also discovered the M&M's weren't confined to just our beds, someone seemed to hae stood in the middle of the room and thrown a whole bag of them like confetti because we found them everywhere. The bathrooms were pretty good, though the sinks were so small, and sat so far beneath the low shelf above them that you needed the spitting prowess of a Spaghetti Western cowboy to be able to brush your teeth there. The pillows, however, did not pass muster, with Laura informing me the morning after our first night "My pillow was no pillow at all, just two lumps of fluff in a sack! Two separate lumps!"