You may have noticed that it took us a bit of time to get our vacation blog posts completed. We’ve been settling into Melbourne much more and actually, gasp!, had plans that kept us busy. Or maybe it’s just that we’re kind of slow about writing sometimes – as IT nerds, neither Jon nor I are particularly natural writers! But we try and here is my attempt at capturing some highlights from recent weeks…

John Oliver at the Palais Theater 
Just getting to see this show at all was a relief because just after I found out John Oliver was coming to Melbourne, I found out that the two scheduled shows were sold out. Luckily, he added a third show and we snapped up tickets. It felt odd when he made a few jokes that assumed everyone in the audience was an Aussie, which makes sense, but just felt odd since I’m not.

#86tramcrawl
We met some super fun people at a 4th of July event and they invited us to tag along on a bar crawl. They’d planned this interesting route to a bunch of bars along the 86 tram with a schedule of when they’d be where and everything. It was so great to get to enjoy the hard work of a well planned afternoon without doing any of the hard work myself! Jon and I just rocked up to the first bar, the Racoon Club, and moseyed our way along the tram route with an increasingly festive group of people. In general, I am a terrible day drinker since I feel like napping after a beer or two in the afternoon, but I gave myself a pep talk and was able to stay out until after dark (aka all hours!).

Classic Cinemas
Both Jon and I really enjoyed Aussie film classic The Castle and thought that the lead actor Michael Caton was great. When we saw he was starring in a new movie, “Last Cab to Darwin”, we knew we had to see it. I found out it was playing at a theater nearby and the theater ended up being fantastic. I am not generally a huge fan of seeing movies in the theater, especially if they are more than 2 hours long, but then I don’t think any movies need to be longer than 2 hours, but that’s a whole other rant. Anyway, Classic Cinemas is an older theater that has been refurbished (somewhat) and has numerous screens with small theaters that feel like you stepped into the theater room in a house on Cribs. It didn’t hurt that they have a decent beer selection.

St Kilda Bowls
We continue to consider joining the St Kilda Bowls club where some friends are members. For a festive Friday evening, we met up with our pals for dinner at shockingly good Mexican place, shocking because not only are we super far from Mexico, but most Mexican food here is not good. Then we all headed to the Bowls club afterward for drinks and footy watching.

Speaking of footy, in Melbourne, footy fever is in full swing. It’s the second to last week of the AFL playoffs or finals as they are actually called here. Jon’s team, North, is still in the mix after an underdog win over the Sydney Swans. Lucky for us, Victoria decided to make the day before the grand final a public holiday just this year so we get an unexpected day off next Friday. Woohoo.