completely lost track of dates now so this will turn up after the last entry i wrote even though we were in melbourne before sydney. never mind eh. right, so we turned up in melbourne and walked round for about an hour with the massive bags trying to find williams, who had taken a different flight again, and eventually bumped into him coming out of a shop. standard. ended up in a hostel seemingly entirely populated by japanese people, although our room turned out to be populated by an australian science geek, typical. naturally he was rather excited when he found out we were (ex) physicists, and i had a great time trying to explain the finer points of magnetohydrodynamics after a few beers. actually he turned out to be pretty sound, and didnt seem to mind us storming in late at night and crashing around. anyway, melbourne is pretty much all about the food and the nightlife so we had been told. the former didn't really live up to initial expectations as we sampled the delights of the melbourne all you can eat bar and bistro, so we decided to focus on the latter for the remainder of our stay. clever boys.

tpos mate royce had spent quite a lot of time in melbourne and recommended a few bars, one of which we discovered after a fairly lengthy search down a dingy and decidedly dodgy alleyway, through an even more dodgy looking doorway. never even would have considered going in there if we hadnt known about it. turned out it was really cool though, most of the bar was out through the back door in a converted alleyway, complete with wall graffiti and lots of what lonely planet would probably call "kitsch." they also played music and sold us beer, which we liked. the next day we got the free tram round the city, which would have been awesome if there had been any sights to see. sadly there weren't any sights to see, so we got off. then we went to the MCG to watch an aussie rules game, which i'll write about later on as my internet time is about to run out. catching coach to port macquarie soon. OUT