Jason's birthday present part 2

The first part of Jason's birthday present was the tattoo. The second part involved a lot more co-ordination and sneaking around (its not like you can surprise someone with a tattoo one morning).

I decided to get a nice photo done for Jason since I really don't like photos and would much rather be on the other side of the camera. Here is the result:

Street art in Melbourne

Last week I had a work trip to Melbourne. I flew over there on the Wednesday afternoon and spent Thursday and Friday there for work. Friday was just a short work day though so I had a bit of time to explore.

I arrived in Melbourne at about 10.30pm local time so I went across to the 7-11 and got some breakfast supplies, checked my email and then hit the sack. Having slept on the plane and having a jumbled body clock (Perth time is 3 hours behind) I didn't sleep until well after midnight. Uh oh... I'm not so good on little sleep.

Anyway, I set the alarm for 5.30am so that I could do my morning run before the course. I got up and started my run. But 3km into it I knew something was wrong... I was just dead tired. My arms were dragging along the ground, my legs were barely moving. After 3km I gave up... upon reflection, I realised I was running at 2.30am in terms of my body clock. So I stopped beating myself up over it.

The course was great, but I won't bore you with the details. Who wants to hear about the Gas Short Term Trading Market anyway :-)

That afternoon after the course, I went out for run number 2! and I rocked it. I was running like a Nike ad. I just felt wicked. I was running intervals to my ipod songs... so had to run up-tempo to every second song and wasn't allowed to slow down until the song finished... did I tell you that I have some 7 - 8 minute songs on my ipod!

Friday started with another run. I kept it easy this morning as I didn't want to injure myself..work wise it was just a short day with two meetings then free time...I have been to Melbourne a few times and I really wasn't in a shopping mood so I just wandered around with no real plan. I went up random alleyways and along odd streets. It was really nice wandering without a purpose as my life is always reasonably busy and structured... and then i got tired :-) Once that hit, I was off to a movie theatre for a bit of Valentines watching.

I must admit I shed a few tears in the movie, but luckily I was by myself.

Anyway, back to my day of wandering. I started with a stroll along the south (I think) side of the Yarra river. Pretty brown river really, not too dissimilar to the Swan River in terms of colour and attractiveness really. Nothing that says "...come for a nice refreshing swim...". But cities with water, whether they are rivers or harbours, are much more attractive I think. I liked the fact that I could just run along the river and there was very little chance that I was going to get lost.

Its been about 3 years since I was last in Melbourne, but I could remember my way round which was great. I think being runner helps with that.

Here is a sculpture on the of the bridges crossing the yarra...
and looking back over towards the city...
I loved the bee sculpture on the side of a building, so did a number of other touristy types.
Another shot of the bees. It was really hard to do them justice.
After this I had a spot of lunch and wandered through the park. generally flowers and plants are my photo thing- but I wasn't feeling it this day. So I decided to head back into the city for some street art.

I found this great alley way with some wicked graffiti.
A close up...
Some little nemo's
Pretty butterflies...

A crazy chick with massive cleavage :-)
And my favorite photo of the lot. I was really pleased with how the photos of the wall worked out.
After the wall I did wander into a few clothing stores but I was hot and bothered and really couldn't face trying on clothes. So I hit the movies for a place to sit down and chill out.

That's about it from Melbourne.

Over and out from Perth.

Perth in summer time...

Perth gets pretty hot in summer time, this means that I sometimes get out and start running before 5am... which is crazy really. But somtimes it really can't be helped. Especially on days where the temperature is predicted to hit in the 40s!

Well just a quick update, but Perth has recently officially baked in its longest spell of hot weather since the turn of the century. The local weather statistics show the city has had seven consecutive days of temperatures greater than 35 degrees. A heatwave in Perth is defined as three consecutive days of temperatures greater than 35 degrees. The other night, Perth's minimum overnight temperature was 27 degrees!!! Lucky we have air conditioning for sleeping.

The heat has been accompanied by a big dry, with just 0.2mm of rain falling so far this year. That is the second driest start to a year on record! However some relief is expected tomorrow when the maximum temperature is expected to "only" hit 30 degrees!!!

With this weather Jason and I experienced another interesting Perth phenomenon. It was 7.30 pm on Sunday night, dark but very hot (32 degrees) so I managed to convince Jason an icecream and a walk on the beach was a good idea. We got there and the beach was all lit up and there were hundreds of families there all playing around as you would during the day. Kids running around in togs, playing in the water and building sand castles... it was just night time... Odd really as I can't imagine ever being able to do that in Wellington. It was like a whole different world that we hadn't seen before. The "take the family to the beach in the dark" world!!! I guess the skin cancer risk is a whole lot lower (and the beach was very pleasant!).

Well that's all on Perth's summer. We are now officially in Autumn and the week's forecast gos something like this: 30, 28, 28, 29, 33 and 35 degrees. Ohhh I love Autumn in Perth!