Making the most of Melbourne

We have been in Melbourne just over a week now. Main reason for being here is to find and sign up new tenants for the apartment. There's always quite a lot of cleaning and maintenance to do between tenancies and we've spent a few days getting it to the standard we like it to be at the start of each new tenancy. Looks pretty good now. Quite a lot of interest this time and we have chosen two exchange students from Ecuador, who are coming to sign a lease tomorrow. Beautiful South American girls don't like to hold parties do they? Er...

This bold little sparrow (below) must have thought it was party time. Headed in one bedroom door off the terrace and couldn't get out the other bedroom door, so it just made itself at home for a bit .

This is me trotting off on sparrow rescue mission. Closely followed by sparrow poop clean up mission.

There's always some festival or event of some kind happening in Melbourne, especially in summer. At the moment, the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival is underway, and on the weekend it was Moomba as well.  Moomba is an institution I remember from my childhood.

The feature is the big street parade, which goes past a stone's throw from our place, so David went out for a look, along with hordes of others.

This (below) is the start of the parade.

Its a real community event with lots of colour and movement, ordinary folk participating, community groups, dancers, bands, floats, the works.

David slipped away after admiring the Australian Navy Brass Band trombone section marching and playing all at the same time. Just as he will be on Anzac Day in Forster in a few weeks.

Then he went off to a sculpture exhibition at the NGV. I was cleaning the bathroom while all this frivolity was going on. Mind you, he's been doing the hard yards catching buses and trams to the hardware store because we don't have our car with us on this trip. And it's been SO HOT! Over a week of 30 plus temperatures and hot and sticky all night too. I'm completely over summer.

These "invisible people" were part of the sculpture exhibition.

 You can't buy bread like this in Diamond Beach. Or coffee like the Bondstore Cafe downstairs makes it.

Saturday night we had the pleasure of sharing dinner at Wim and Lian's, with Lian cooking, always a treat. She made a spectacular salmon dish created by middle eastern chef Greg Malouf. A salmon fillet is barely poached then served cool, smothered in fabulous herbs and other delicious stuff, with a fennel salad. Dessert was a lemon tart from Babka's around the corner. David nearly wept with delight.

Wim's maidenhair fern got dried out so I gave it the old fashioned burn treatment, which is supposed to trigger a flush of new growth.

Tonight we decided we had been virtuously cleaning, organising, preparing and repairing for long enough. So we walked over to China town and found one of those places with BBQ ducks hanging in the window and had a good feed. Then stopped in at a Taiwanese dessert shop where none of the other customers were round eyes like us. Ordered this (above) as an experiment. Fantastic.