Chilling in Melbourne

.....in more ways than one.  You can see your breathe here! Inside!

 "4 seasons in one day weather"  in Melbourne?  My arse.  It's just winter!.

  

It’s been lovely staying with Sean and getting to meet and know Gulliver, (hasn’t started school yet, but reads fluently- I’m terribly impressed!) So I have been hanging around Sean’s house which is about an hour out of Melbourne for the last couple for days, as it’s the weekend and the weather’s rubbish.  


However, we have been out... As well as experiencing and getting lost in the most enormous mall yesterday, Sean drove me around some of the countryside where the bushfires were yesterday....to show me how close they came to being consumed by it all, – it seriously was “just over the next hill” and how vast swathes of forest became blackened stumps; 


it was like looking into Mordor....

And then noticing that from some of these black dead looking trees, green was budding, how the forest is once again coming back to life, and how quickly and irrepressibly nature crawls back.  There are still areas which really were totally killed, but by next spring there will be life sprouting there again too.  Out of the charred and blackened remains green is sprouting everywhere... it’s rather emotive and life affirming seeing patches of the freshest brightest green emerging from the deadest looking places!

Today I came with Sean to work, in Doncaster which is still some way out of Melbourne, and I was going to train it in to the city for a walk around but it’s so drizzly and grey and wet and cold that I have decided to stay in the shopping mall where he works..... do a bit of blogging, and catch up with emails and such.  There is a cinema, lots of shops and food (though I had to have a McDonalds to sit here and use their wireless.... but I can always handle a sausage mcmuffin every so often)

I might go and see a film this afternoon...

The second you can see due to good weather I can go and have a cultural tour of Melbourne with pictures and such...honest!  it's so weird though because everything's so new... I've been to pubs older than this country... so  am wonderng apart from the art galleries and botanic gardens what to see, although there is a very tall building with a vertigo inducing glass floored bit that sticks out so you can go and experience that...

I left my lonely planet at home so if anyone has any recommendations of things to go to please let me know.