My 21st Birthday! (or what I remember of it...)

Good news: I survived my 21st birthday! (Well, at least I hope you consider that good news…)

My supervisor at work let me have Thursday off so I could make the long trek to Melbourne, which also happens to conveniently be the Swine Flu capital of the world at the moment. All I had to do before I left was start on my summary of the summaries I wrote on the articles (and a lot of the information I wrote about came from a summary of each article itself). So, so far I can summarize my summer as writing a summary of summaries of summaries. Say that three times fast.

I had to wake up around 6 in the morning of July 2nd in order to catch the early coach to Albury, catch another coach to Seymour, and eventually hop on a train to Melbourne. The coach left at 7:15 am and I finally got into Melbourne at around 4. Believe it or not, that was actually about an hour earlier than I thought I would get in, because I was able to catch an earlier train. I was originally supposed to meet my friend Sara at the station when she got off of work at 5, but since I had an extra hour I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. I brought a little touristy book on Melbourne with me that came with a map, so I decided to see if anything nearby looked interesting. That’s when I saw it. I knew what I was going to do as soon as I got off the train. I was going to go to Batman Park.

Unfortunately, Batman Park is not as cool as it sounds. It just kind of looked like every other park, but a lot smaller. So I made my way back up to the station too meet up with Sara, and we went to where she was staying to make some dinner with her roommate.

Sara lives in a homestay with another student, Lindsey, who I met at the orientation in Cairns. She’s from Canada, and since it was between Canada Day and the Fourth of July, we decided to cook some kind of Canadian/American meal. It didn’t really come off as that though. We had some chicken, grilled peppers, tortilla chips, and guacamole. Not the most American/Canadian meal, but it was still good. I was really tired so we didn’t go out that night. I know it was the night of the 2nd, but I figured that since everything is a day later here, I could celebrate the night of the 3rd as when I “officially” turn 21.

The first course of action on my birthday was to go tour a Brewery. The Carlton Brewery required reservations to tour, so we had to book them in advance and rush over to reach it by noon. I was pretty much completely lost in Melbourne, but luckily Sara and Lindsey had their bearings straight (although Sara did put us on the wrong train on occasion…).

It was a fun experience touring the Brewery, and now I know a bit about how to make beer. I like Carlton beer mainly because they have trivia questions under every bottle cap. Thus, the more you drink, the smarter you become. Well, the tour ended after one and a half hours and MANY beer samplings later, and we were craving Indian food.

Usually Indian food isn’t that hard to find in Australia. It’s pretty diverse as far as international cuisine is concerned, but for some reason everywhere we went the only Indian restaurants we could find were closed… Go figure. After an hour of searching we gave up, ate at a foodcourt, and tried to find the Melbourne museum. There was some kind of Star Wars exhibit at the museum, and I wanted to go see that. Unfortunately, when we got to the museum we found out that it closes at 4:30. Conveniently, we arrived there at 4:40. Wonderful.

I may or may not leave some of the finer details of the night out… so let’s just skip ahead to dinner. Sara and Lindsey took me to this weird dumpling restaurant in Chinatown. It was really good, and really authentic. There wasn’t a waiting list or anything, but rather a line outside. The owner would run outside when a spot opened up and would find a party of the appropriate number and seat them. They also play this awkward “Happy Birthday” song for you when it’s your birthday. It’s awkward because the music plays throughout the restaurant, but no servers come acknowledge it’s your birthday, so whenever the song plays you never know who it’s playing for. Usually that’s fine, because not many people like to get embarrassed at restaurants on their birthday (I work at Joe’s Crab Shack… I know), but the song played 3 times we were their, and every time Sara would yell “It’s his birthday!” and point at me. But, I suppose that after the amount of times I’ve made people yell “I’ve got crabs!” on their birthday, I’m still getting off easy. A few bars, 5 hours, and a certain number of drinks I won’t reveal later, we arrived back at their house and managed not to wake their host mom.

The next day was a lot calmer. We went to visit the botanical gardens and took a private walking tour with this really nice old lady. Since we got a pretty late start, it lasted most of the day. They also took me to the “artsy” side of Melbourne to see some cool architecture and a street performer. Also, since it was the Fourth of July, I was able to talk to my mom and wish her a happy birthday while she wished me a happy birthday since it was still July 3rd in America. Our July 4th celebrations included finally finding some Indian food for dinner and going back to the house to watch the classical American film, “The Patriot”. Because the night before was so late and I had to get up at 6:30 in the morning to catch the train, we didn’t feel like going out.

So I woke up early and Sara actually took me to the train, since she thought I would get lost on my way there. In all honesty, I probably would have, as we had to take two buses and a train to get to the station. Lindsey was going to come too, but she felt sick. I said goodbye to them and made the long trek back to Canberra. I really don’t mind long travels on a coach or train (as long as I have a window seat), because I can look out at the scenery forever. All in all it was a great time, and I love the city of Melbourne. If you ever go to Australia, don’t just head to Sydney and call it a day. Melbourne is an incredible city that is not to be missed.

I haven’t done much since coming back. Last night my family here took me out to a pizza place for a “birthday” dinner. It was really nice and I got some cool souvenir gifts too. I’ve been spending most of my time trying to wrap my head around this video Lindsey showed me called “Imagining the Tenth Dimension”. If you ever have extra time and want to get your mind blown, look it up on youtube.

That’s all for now! I brought my camera to work, so hopefully I can upload some pictures this time…