Three weeks in the States

My role at work has changed, and it kicked off with a fairly short notice visit to the San Francisco office. I needed to be in the US for a while, so I decided to split up my visit with one week in the middle, working from the "home office" in Tennesee and North Carolina. But SF was first. While the Sydney office is dog-friendly, it felt like half the living things in the SF office were dogs! I'll be honest, it was really hard to work while there were so many cute dogs around!  

This pup was 18 weeks. He stole my heart

 

This big guy was a big sweetheart, who just wanted to be loved

The dogs come to meetings too

  Besides all the dogs, there's not too much interesting about my time in SF. The rough thing about the time difference is that just when you wrap up your work day there, Sydney is coming online, so it's easy to get caught up and work until it's too late to be doing anything fun and touristy. I'll do better next time!  Luckily I was able to fit in a quick jaunt over to Tennessee and and North Carolina for a quick visit.  

 

 

 Holly and I managed to fit in both a cooking class and walks in Greenville and Charlotte. Greenville is still one of my all-time favorite places!  

And downtown Charlotte was great fun too.  

In our cooking class, we practiced making macarons. Of course it seemed really easy during the class!  

 

We also took full advantage of the southern summer weather and had a proper back deck dinner. Such a good way to spend a summer evening, and there's really no substitute for it! 

Between times with Holly and family, seeing some dear friends, and working with both people in the US and Australia, the time absolutely flew by. But still, at the end of three weeks, I was happy to get on a plane and head back to Sydney. What a lucky girl I am, to have two homes!

Melbs! (Part Two)

One stereotype of Melbourne that we found to be true is that it has a serious food culture. So a visit to Melbs should definitely focus heavily on the food scene.

One of our biggest wins for food was taking a 30 minute walk out to the Fitzroy neighborhood. This little section of the city is the hippest of the hip - lots of quirky shops, lots of flannel, lots of mustaches, but really anything goes out there. It's just a big mishmash of people doing their thing. We really liked it, but by far the best part was hitting up Smith & Deli.

Smith and Daughters is an entirely vegan restaurant, and Smith and Deli is their casual sandwich cafe. It was recommended to us by a work friend, and when we got there, it was obvious that others shared her opinion of it being great food. The line was literally out the door.

 

The food was too fun - they offer around 30 different sandwiches - all vegan. A lot of them are traditional sandwich types, like Philly cheesesteak or a Cuban ham sandwich. Then there were unique ones, like an "American Thanksgiving sandwich," with turkey, cranberry spread, mashed potatoes, etc. They make most of their fake meats in house, so they didn't have the overly processed flavor you can get sometimes with fake meat. So yum! 

Needless to say, this was a super meal for us! We loved our sandwiches so much that we went back to the real restaurant the next day!

The flavor of Fitzroy

Feeling peppy after my sandwich!

 After lunch, we found a spot to eat the "Christine" pastry we'd bought in the city that morning. When you find a cake with the same name as you, you really have to eat it.

One thing I love about Melbourne is that it seems like the city loves to put art anywhere it can. In the sidewalk pavings, as installations in open space, or on the sides of buildings. This was an amazing mosaic that went up the side of an office building.

 

Did I mention that Melbourne is pretty trendy and cultured? So much so that it might border on being a bit pretentious and outrageous at times. There's no better way to capture this, I think, then this picture of the MacDonalds with macaroons on the menu.

We also found a flier for a film festival on that weekend that looked pretty fun. T didn't seem to agree though.

We got a flight + hotel deal for our trip, so I wasn't sure what to expect for our hotel. But it turned out to be great! We were right on the river, looking across at Southbank. We walked around Southbank a bit, but it wasn't our favorite. It's mostly businesses with overpriced restaurants along the river walk. So while the vibe was fun, it didn't have as much character as we got elsewhere.

Not to be outdone by Sydney with its Vivid festival, Melbourne has a public area that has light shows every night and live music on the weekends. There were lots of people enjoying the lights and hanging out. Very fun!

Most creative busker of the trip was this person, dressed as Cookie Monster and playing the bagpipes. I gave him/her a gold coin for effort and because it made me laugh. 

Our other notable food adventure took place in the Italian district in Lygon Street. We learned on our free tram ride that Melbourne has the largest population of Italians outside of Italy. And it really does show in the city - so many little coffee cafes! 

But the touristy thing to do is go up to Lygon Street, which is just a concentrated mass of Italian restaurants that go for about 4 blocks. So of course we decided that sounded fun.

Arancini the size of your head - what could go wrong?

People were PACKED in. The restaurants tended to be pretty small inside, so sidewalk seating was the thing to do. I took a pic of the sidewalk as we were leaving, which ironically has the sign of the only chain restaurant on the street.

At every place, there was a little Italian man standing outside, trying convince the passersby to eat at that particular restaurant. They all had very similar spiels, were all over the top Italian, and they were very persistent, which cracked us up. So I grabbed a video of one of them. 

We ended up with a sunny day on Sunday, so we decided to grab a tram out to St Kilda, the little town in the coast. We bought tickets for the tram and were about halfway to St Kilda when, in true Aussie fashion, the tram stopped and the driver told everyone on board that he wasn't going to St Kilda after all, and anyone wanting to go that way should get off. It was never entirely clear what was happening, but as you do here, we just shrugged our shoulders, climbed off, and watched him go on his way. 

Luckily there were quite a few people from the tram that also were trying to go St Kilda, and they were locals, so we figured that we could just follow them the rest of the way. And walking meant that we got to take in some quirky parts of the city that we otherwise wouldn't have seen. 

And then we made it to St Kilda! Sunday markers were on along the esplanade that overlooks the beach. It was idyllic.

T's level of enjoyment for a Melbourne market was the same as a Sydney one, it seems

The Melbourne Luna Park

And then to the beach! 

It was pretty cold and windy along the beach. And I have to say, as a beach, it had nothing on the Sydney beaches.

On the way back to the city, we got off the tram early so we could walk by the Shrine of Remembrance. It's a beautiful memorial, set on top of a hill so you can see the city and vice versa. It was really beautiful inside too.

Before we were ready, our long weekend was over and the time in Melbourne came to an end. It was such a fun weekend for both of us, but Toby in particular fell in love with the city. So now we are a house divided, just like every other Aussie family: one of us loves Sydney, and the other finds Melbourne superior. I guess the only solution is more weekend adventures to Melbs!

         

Melbs! (Part One)

Well my blog is horribly behind. Mostly because I went to San Francisco for work on short notice. But, before I was away for three weeks, we went to Melbourne for the Queens Birthday long weekend. Yay!  

I went to Melbourne early on with Holly, but Toby has never been. So he was excited to check it out. We learned early on here that there is a serious rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne. Sydney people think it's the best because we have beaches and warmer weather, and Melbourne people think it's the best because they have more "culture." After our visit, T and I might have come down on either side of the argument!

We headed down to Melbs, as the cool Aussies say, on Friday after work. Our hotel was right next to the famous Flinders Street station, which was a lovely welcome to the city all lit up at night. 

The next morning, we headed out to ramble the laneways and fine some breakky. The cool laneways are other reason that Melbournites think that it's better than Sydney, and to be fair, they are pretty fun.  

 

 

After breakfast, we were ready to check out the city!

The famous side of Flinders Street Station

 

Feeling happy to be on an adventure 

There's a free tram that goes around the city, so it's a perfect way to see the areas of the city before you walk around. So that's what we decided to do. 

Added bonus, the free trams are historic, so they are really cute and fun to ride in.

It was a bit rainy by the time we finished circling the city in our free tram. So we decided to do some walking through some of the shopping areas to stay under cover.

After not too long, we got lucky with the weather and it cleared up. Back out to the laneways and to do some walking in the city!

  

More pics of our fun adventures in the next one, but to sum up, we had a really great time exploring the city. It's easy to walk, and the city has a unique mix of old buildings and modern art. The weather stayed great and we had a full two days of fun exploring!