After a highly eventful Friday, despite our best effort, we slept in. We had a kinda tighter schedule for Saturday. James had a rehearsal for his play “Burn Down the School” that he is putting on for the Mudfest festival at his university in August. And I had lunch with Tündi, one of my relatives who lives in Melbourne.

Before doing all this we planned to go to the Royal Botanical Gardens. After some stress from James’ wallet staying in his Mum car, we arrived to the gardens and had a lovely walk through it. These botanical gardens are huge compared to any Hungarian parks inside the city, like Város Liget. It is also a lot better taken care of. The fauna was well kept, with multiple beautiful tiny constructions, like stone gazebos or fountains. Almost every plant and tree had a placard stating the name of it in English and Latin, and also they were organised by where they were from. Besides all of this they looked super pretty and were flourishing.

Since we didn’t have time to have a picnic, we just walked, admiring how full of life it was. Birds of all kinds everywhere, flowers blossoming, people having brunch and walking their dogs. Definitely worth a visit. We decided to come back another time to take advantage of the free walking tour and have a proper picnic.

From the garden we walked to the Shrine of Remembrance, which is right next to it. The Shrine is hands down one of the strangest building in the way that it doesn’t fit into it’s surroundings, but it is breathtakingly beautiful. It has a strong Greek-Egyptian vibe, not a surprise since it was modelled after the Pantheon of Athens. It is in the middle of Melbourne with a nice view to the city centre full of skyscrapers.

The Shrine was built to remember the fallen Australians of the First World War, but since it has become the memorial to all Australians who died in war. On the side the words “Greater love hath no man” is written. On Remembrance Day, which is 11th of November, the sun shines through the window on the roof and lights up the word “Love”.

After this weird detour into Greece we went on our ways. I travelled on my own for the first time in Melbourne. The city’s public transport is all based on the Myki card which you can top up with money and as you touch on and off it automatically takes money off based on the length of your journey. When we met up, Tündi took me one of her usual places near her university, where we had amazing Japanese bento boxes. I had a lovely time talking about my time here, her family in Melbourne and mine back in Budapest and travelling in general.

I met up with James at Melbourne University to catch the end of his rehearsal. It was so interesting to see his vision, that I have seen on paper slowly coming to life. With his friends we went to a bar called Pixel Alley, which was filled with arcades games. We spent hours trying out all the games and playing away our tokens. For dinner the plan was to go to Naked for Satan, which used to have finger food where they charged for each individual toothpick. They did not have this kind of buffet anymore. The other reason James wanted to take me there was the rooftop bar, but that was filled. Unfortunately Naked for Satan was disappointing with only a small elevator operating between the ground and 4th floor and the lack of tables.

On Sunday we went to the Melbourne Museum with Sally and Ian, James’ parents. There was a temporary exhibition called, Revolutions, Records and Rebels, so we started with that. The exhibition was about the 60s and the different kind of revolutions that took place then, like revolutions of music, sex or fashion. We got headphones at the entrance and it played different music as you moved on from one room to the other. The exhibition had a really good selection of visuals and informative descriptions for them. In one of the room they had a 3-wall cinema playing a short film about the Woodstock festival that you could enjoy on cosy beanbags.

We were the first to get out of the exhibition and after James and Sally said Ian was probably gonna be in for a while longer, James and I started looking around in the rest of the museum. We started with one of the most unique features of the museum; its inside rainforest. The Melbourne Museum has a proper little jungle inside with birds and lizards cruising around.

We had to leave Sally and Ian because we were going to the cinema with some of James’ friends, Emma and Lucas. We had a lift from James’ lovely parents to the shopping mall where we had the meeting scheduled. Since we skipped lunch we looked for some late afternoon tea kind of meal in the shopping centre called Melbourne Central. We chose a Chinese restaurant and shared wonton soup and some dumplings. In the night we watched “Yesterday”, a comedy about a world that forgets the Beatles exist, while an amateur musician remembers the songs and starts performing them as his own. It was a cute film with some good jokes and familiar tunes.