This morning I got up and dressed, then spent the rest of the morning drinking tea and watching South Park with Sarah. We also flicked back through the weekend’s newspapers and chit-chatting. Tom and Becs had gone to work, so it was quite quiet in the house, we also used the time to have a bit of a clean up.
When Sarah left to go to uni, I also left and went to the tram stop, where a tram arrived shortly after I did. After being scared on the tram by some very boganistic bogans, I arrived in the city and went for a bit of a wander along Bourke Street (good for shops!). Despite the very sunny weather, there was a definite chill in the air, but I ploughed on in my tshirt, fighting back against the cold. I decided that this might not be able to last much longer and noticed a shop with a winter sale on, so popped in there. The sale was surprisingly good so I invested in a couple more tops with sleeves which I am very sure will come in most handy as the winter weather develops further.
My mini shopping trip brought me round to just about the right time for the main reason for my trip into the city – meeting up with Bobbie and Nicola from my Stray bus tour of the South Island. Both girls had just arrived in Melbourne and would be staying for a few days before making their ways to their next destinations. We had arranged to meet in Federation Square and I had no trouble in finding them. We were all thrilled to be seeing each other in a different country, it actually seemed a bit odd to be doing so!
To get a good amount of girlie chat in, Nicola took us to a tiny little cafe down a side street I had never noticed before. It was the most amazing place and was called ‘Little Cupcakes’. As with most Aussie (and Kiwi) names, it did exactly what it said on the tin – sold little cupcakes. But these cupcakes were so sumptuous looking that it almost seemed a crime to eat them! We each had a coffee and a different little cupcake – I had a chocolate jaffa one; moist chocolate sponge with orange flavoured buttercream and an orange chocolate on top. Mmmmmm! It was super good! As we sat enjoying our coffees, we chatted about what had happened to each of us since we’d last seen one another and sharing information about what had happened to other people we knew – ok, so I mean gossiping! Although I have never seen it, I felt like this might be what the girls do from that show/film Sex And The City – gossip over a opulent mini cake and delectable coffee in an exclusive little cafe!
The little coffee shop was fit to bursting point as the queue went out the door and there were only 9 seats, of which we were taking up four (one each and one for bags!), so we decided to vacate and instead took our chatting and gossiping to the shops – wandering around Swanston and Bourke Street, window shopping, looking at some of the sales all whilst chin-wagging about everything and nothing. Every now and then one of us would point out somewhere that we’d been, such as a restaurant or shop and recommend it (or not) to the others. It was interesting as we’d all spent some time in Melbourne but been to very different places and done very different things. One thing that none of us had done, but all wanted to do, was visit the Old Melbourne Gaol, so we thought it’d be nice to do that together, if it was still open (it was getting quite late in the afternoon).
When we arrived at the gaol (after discussing how you say the word – the girls thought it was pronounced ‘goal’ or ‘gay-oal’, so I set them straight on that!), the guy said we had just under an hour, but that we’d be able to get around and see most things in that time, plus he’d give us a discount on the entrance fee; result!
The gaol itself is famous for having been the place where Ned Kelly was incarcerated and hung. There were three floors and it was very dark, cold and ominous looking! We wandered around and looked in the different cells that were open. They were all really small and cramped, with little or no light coming into them. This gaol was clearly built in the time when there was meant to be no comfort for prisoners. What was particularly freaky was that in each cell there was a dismembered head in a glass box. The dismembered head wasn’t actually a dismembered head per se, it was the death mask of an inmate who had inhabited that cell and then been hung. Apparently they would take a mould of the prisoner’s head after the prisoner had been hung and would then create the death mask. They did look eerie indeed.
We saw a lot of information about Ned Kelly and the cell he had been in, along with his death mask. We then found a couple of Ned Kelly style outfits to dress up in; it looked like his armour and mask, but obviously wasn’t made of thick metal like his! How he walked about wearing that get up is beyond me – forgetting the weight that it must have been, the actual design can’t have been particularly conducive to running around; no wonder he ended up being taken down by the police shooting him in the legs! Dressing up in these outfits caused us much amusement, but also for a bunch of tourists who looked on!
Upstairs was the set of gallows they used at the gaol and a lot of information on the best way to hang someone. It seems that they hung a lot of people, as the long lists on the walls around the gallows demonstrated. Elsewhere in the prison we found a very interesting section about women in prison and learned that Ned Kelly’s mum was actually in the prison at the same time as him. When we were at the top of the prison, we heard metal clunking and my instant reaction was that it was the ghostly sounds of the cell doors slamming shut, however on investigation, it was the guy from the entrance starting to lock it up, so we made our way out!
After we left the gaol, we headed back to the city and said our goodbyes. I decided to head back to Little Cupcakes and get some for the house - I just about made it there in time, as they were just starting to close. I picked up a dozen little cupcakes of different flavours (which was more or less all they had left!) and knew the girls would love them!
On my way to the tram stop I had a call from Tom who was at the pub (The Prince Albert), having finished work, so I headed up there to meet him. We had a couple of drinks with a couple of his friends and between us had a go at completing the quiz in the newspaper, but it was way harder than usual and so we didn’t do very well. As we chatted, the conversation turned to iconic/traditional Aussie things and it came out that I had not had a ‘chicken parma’ (parma being short for parmiagana), so it was decided that we had to have dinner at PAs so I could try a parma. It was very good – crumbed chicken breast topped with tomato, bacon and cheese; so nothing overly amazing or unusual, but tasty nonetheless.
We headed back home and found the girls watching tv. I presented them with the box of little cupcakes and they went wild with excitement, as I knew they would! I also showed them the tops I had bought and they said that the sale season is just starting, so there may be more bargains out there waiting for us! We spent the rest of the evening chilling out in front of the tv, chatting, nibbling on the cupcakes and shouting at Masterchef contestants!
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