Thursday, July 27, 2017

Melbourne Shopping then New Zealand

We had the whole day to explore Melbourne before moving on to New Zealand. 






We looked around the massive Queen Victoria Market. It was mostly junk.


We poked around in the hipster neighborhood of Fitzroy.


I had another meat pie. I like meat pies. This time it was at Babka which was like a bakery with a Russian flavor.


Lydia enjoying a flat white.




Zoe's special so we took her to second lunch at a special place. I had a beer made out of tacos.




We made another pass at the State Library Victoria, this time checking out the interior. I visited the library with Tung back in 2009 and I was impressed how much I remembered. The highlight of the place is really the display with Ned Kelly's armor. My couple of days in Melbourne were full of echoes from my previous visit here. I'm curating quite the collection of experiences here.








At the airport they had cool automatic bag scanning machines.


Australia's Burger Kings are all called Hungry Jack's. The culture shock is real.


The Aussie burger's signature ingredient is a layer of beets. Australians seem to like beets a little more than I would consider socially acceptable.


New Zealand time son!


New Zealand Air's safety video was very fantastical and odd. It starred Katie Holmes and Cuba Gooding Jr. as some sort of god-like creators of the world. Man is it weird.


New Zealand and Australia both had cool automatic immigration systems. Luckily this time it didn't work for me and I got kicked out into a classic immigration line because that meant I got a sweet passport stamp. Everyone else was jealous. Note the little Silver Fern frond there at the bottom, as it's a national symbol.




The line through immigration was fine but the customs line was nightmarishly long and slow. There were people importing whole coolers of fish and other weird crap. Eventually we made it through the gates to the last country of the trip: New Zealand! Screw you, Old Zealand!

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