Saturday, 16 August 2008

OZ +4: Easy like Saturday Morning...

Time for a bit of a lie-in today and then spent the morning in and around Melbourne.

In a recent poll, it is apparently Australia's most "liveable" city and it's easy to see why. There are lots of parks, wide streets and quite a bit of regeneration going on. The riverside is particularly nice, even though the Yarra River is very polluted and they are trying to clean it up.

At Federation Square, they have built some new piece of tessellation masquerading as an arts centre...



...and a steady stream of visitors was ambling through to (not) spend hours looking at the Danish Book Fair (or whatever it was - something akin...)

There is the obligatory bizarre pedestrian bridge (viz Gateshead, Berlin and, Kevin McCloud, Castleford)...



...and some big, non-descript sculptures...



We had time to take the tram to St Kilda...



...which is a bit seasidey: it has those shops where you can buy flip-flops (thongs), a jaunty hat with a slogan, kangaroo scrotum cigarette lighter...



...and it has Luna Park, which contains one of those rickety wooden rollercoasters which looks like it was bolted together in the late forties by prisoners of war and has maybe been checked over for safety purposes at least once every ten years since then.

Lots of excellent places for lunch though! (Of which we only had time, and the stomach, for one...)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm thinking that maybe the bod who designed the giant nondescript scultures in Mansfield has been plying his trade further afield!

Mr Christopher said...

That's bizarre. There was SO a Danish Book Fair (or should that be Fayre?) going on when I was there too! It must be the place!