Melbourne

Find myself staying in an ex convent this week and am greeted by a clock on Bethlehem and Vatican time in the hallway with pictures of saints peering down solemnly from the walls. All I need is a Sacred Heart in the kitchen and I’d be right at home!
So a week after the Melbourne Cup and the Aussies haven’t stopped lording it over the beaten Europeans and the papers still pour scorn over the Irish for getting it so badly wrong. Let it go! If there’s one thing I’ve discovered about the Aussies this trip is that they like to be the best at everything. Not just at sport but EVERYTHING. Each town we’ve visited has boasted of having the biggest/tallest/greatest/widest (delete as necessary) something in the state/country/Southern Hemisphere/world. Nothing’s exempt: from pineapples to Shell Museums, everything can aspire to be the best or biggest something or another. And when it comes to Melbourne and Sydney, so long as they are better than the other it doesn’t matter about the rest of the world. The rivalry between these cities stems from long ago, to the point that as neither city could bear the honour of being Capital to go to the other, a random place halfway between them was chosen instead and so Canberra was built. The competition between the cities has persisted to this day. We overheard defeated Melbourne Victory fans discussing how they reckoned the Soccer League is rigged purely to enable Sydney to win. The funniest was a notice at the end of St Kilda Pier in Melbourne, describing the reconstruction of a coffee shop that had been burnt down in 2003. The council had a chance to rebuild “ a building as beautiful as the Opera House” but decided they already had something just as good as the Sydneysiders and just rebuilt the kiosk instead. Coffee shop versus Sydney Opera House…hmmmmm there’s a comparison not often made.
So Melbourne or Sydney, which is better? Melbourne is a cool place; more laid back than Sydney, easier to get about and Fitzroy where we’re staying has the funkiest selection of shops and bars. Sydney though, edges it for me, with that harbour and beaches and an indefinable touch of romance that captures my imagination in a way that Melbourne doesn’t. Needless to say Mike disagrees and prefers Melbourne so I guess if we were to move here we’d have to live in Canberra.

St Kilda's Pier Kiosk and the Opera House....go figure