Tuesday

We woke up to a beautiful day with weather in the high 60s and lots of sunshine! Perfect timing for our outing to the Botanical Gardens this afternoon!

We started off our day with a quick visit to the Queen Victoria Market in the city. It is the largest of the markets here, and when I say this place has almost everything, I am not exaggerating! There were tons and tons of vendors stalls- so many that we didn’t even have time to walk past more than about a third of them before they closed. It was crazy! Hoping we can go back before we leave to see more.

After the market we headed over to the Melbourne Royal Botanic Gardens- another huge place that we just scratched the surface of in the hours we were there. It is big, beautiful, and free, like so many things here. We took a great walk around parts of the gardens and the lake.

After a stop by our condo, we headed out once more to get pizza for dinner. This was not just any old pizza, this was THE pizza from my Google search results last summer on “Australia’s best pizza”. Across multiple websites, I kept coming across this award- winnning pizza place called “48h Pizza e Gnocchi Bar” in Melbourne, and being the pizza fan I am, I knew I wanted to try it when we arrived. I can definitely say it did not disappoint!!! The name 48h refers to the minimum length of time (48 hours) required for their pizza dough to rise. The pizza was absolutely fantastic, and I am already dreaming about the leftovers as I write this. 😂❤️😍🍕

Wednesday

Breakfast was leftover pizza- of course!- and we had a slow and lazy start to our day. In the afternoon we headed out via tram to explore the Docklands area of Melbourne.

Docklands

The Docklands are a waterfront inner city neighborhood that has been revitalized with a bunch of shops and restaurants and fun things to do. We spent some time walking around and checking out all the Christmas shoppers, plus a local university had their graduation today, so there were a ton of graduates in caps and gowns walking around and celebrating. It made for a very festive atmosphere!

When we left the Docklands, we walked for a while and then took the tram back over to the CBD. Our pre-dinner quest was to check out some of the street art/graffiti areas, including Melbourne’s “AC/DC Lane”. The street art scene here is huge and very colorful. In fact, most of Melbourne, including their buildings, is very colorful.

After our cultured art outing 😂, we had dumplings for dinner in Chinatown and then headed back to the Yarra riverfront to watch their Christmas lights on the river show. This was the same show that we enjoyed Monday from the river cruise, but today we went and watched from the sidewalk in front of the Crown hotel (who sponsors the show), so we could see all the laser graphics. They had lights and fountains dancing to Christmas music, and it was really fun. A little time at the Crown casino after the show ended our day, before we headed back to our condo in the tram. Love how good the public transportation is here!

Thanks for adventuring with us!