Aussie Arvo // ThirstyInMelb #3

So day 3 and 4 combined. Why? Because I just wanted to enjoy myself there and chill without snapping memories every few seconds. Aka I got lazy. Post 3 two weeks later. Why? Same reason as above, the L word hahaha BUT HEYY it's up now!!!

Started the day by visiting Fitzroy Gardens because garden. Hahahaha there isn't much of a reason but we know how pretty the gardens and parks in Melbourne are and this was the only park we planned to visit. Might as well! We literally took pictures at this spot for like 15 minutes before playing on the swings and then just leaving hahaha I mean what else can you do at a park? We didn't bring food with us so picnic was a no go T^T

So we left the park looking for some food and got super upset at Mama Wong, how dare you!  They closed as soon as we entered the place. But I won't let you guys get annoyed at her, this blog is about happy memories hahaha

So walked a little further and decided to just eat at Nandos! Personally, I don't like Nandos. The Peri-Peri sauce doesn't have enough flavour and eating them with the super dry chicken from Singapore uGH but the chicken in Melbourne was pretty juicy so yay!

We actually had to follow a strict schedule that day if we wanted to watch the sunrise from the Eureka Skydeck but we were like ehhhhhhhhhhh (this was us pretty much everyday there, just chill, laid back) and after resting and filling up our tank at Nandos, we walked down to National Gallery of Victoria. I was pretty excited for this because we didn't have much historical European paintings in Singapore. SAM was just modern contemporary stuff... Which personally is kinda too much for a bimbo like me?

I lost my bandana at the museum :( like I don't even know how? The floors were white and bare and spotless but when I realised the bandana wasn't around my neck anymore, and we retraced our steps, we found NOTHING on the floor like whut...

We spent only about an hour there, didn't see much of the other artefacts because other than the paintings, the exhibits we pretty similar to the ones you can find in Singapore. I know, you guys are probably judging like "they're all different, you can't just generalise the exhibits!" but we were short on time if we wanted to catch the sunset from the Eureka Skydeck so we left!

So the Eureka Skydeck was basically like ION Sky or the N-Seoul Tower in Korea. But the sky went on forever, you could probably see into Tasmania or something! We paid a little extra to go for the Edge. It's basically a little glass box where you'll be standing over the city like legit glass floor BUT the glass was kinda dirty and we were like wot for realz pfffft but it was still lovely! 10/10 would recommend going here but maybe not the Edge haha

We stayed till we couldn't see any light from the sky and walked down to the Crown Hotel for a little fire show and headed home yay! It was a nice way to end the night, just sitting by the Yarra River with the cold air.

Day 4! Finally going to meet Zaki and head to his house for dinner! Because Zaki has school that day, we were to meet him a little after noon and my dad over FaceTime the previous night was like "Go explore your neighbourhood!" and so we did. We planned to make use of our kitchen so we decided to look for some halal chicken at the local market near our house and some fresh vegetables maybe.

So we got lost trying to find Zaki in the city but we did manage to find him and Afiq and their Drake filled car after like 15 minutes and went on to Brighton Beach!

Like seriously, look at that city scape from the beach, it's so pretty!!! Like little lego buildings that giants wouldn't want to step on because you know how stepping on Lego sucks and hurts.

Hi Afiq, hi Iffah, what're you smiling at? Your bright futures?

There was an ice-cream truck at the parking lot of Brighton Beach and we wanted to buy some but Afiq was like "Nah man, not worth it, we'll bring you to Cold Rock" and we were like oh okay and he paid for our ice-cream and like omg so nice thanks Afiq!

Zaki was keen on bringing us to DFO and we were like okayyy we'll go wherever you take us haha but no regrets though, I did most of my shopping there aka a pair of Vans slip-ons and a shirt from Cotton On.

Who takes pictures while shopping??? Nobody unless you're like gift shopping and need someone's opinion and you take a picture of a gift and send it on Whatsapp or something but the point is I didn't take any pictures while in DFO! Only took a picture of the sunset from the parking lot which looks glorious! The infinite sky is just so pretty I can't even!

We headed to Zaki's place for dinner where we met Zeff, their gray bengal cat and had amazeballs roast beef and roast potatoes and roast PUMPKIN OMG and mashed potatoes they were all so good and cooked by Zaki's mom

At the end of the night, Zamir brought us to Pakenham Hill to watch the stars but omg it was so freaking cold and cloudy we saw nothing hahaha

Some peeing thing happened and Zamir and Afiq drove us home yay!

It was a super chill 2 days and I loved it there. Zaki's family is just so warm and loving I wish you guys could meet them haha well that's all!

I'm sorry it took this long but I've also been sick these day so I delayed everything.

Hope you guys are still looking forward to the following posts from the #ThirstyInMelb series!

Also here is the link if you wanna see Melbourne in film

xoxo

Squidkid

Wanderers // ThirstyInMelb #2

Agenda for today:
- wander and discover the city

Day 2 was a pretty chill day, just to walk around the city and snap some photos. This was how most of our trip went, walking around free and public spaces taking pictures.
We were still getting used to the beauty Melbourne is, so for the first few days we were there, we took photos along the route to the train station from our house. Such tourists we are...
BUT DO YOU SEE HOW AMAZING THE WEATHER IS????
Sunny and windy, the perfect duo, like really! You might think Nutella and banana is the couple of the century but sun and wind?????? bRuHhhhh

*shoutout to my cousins (kakak Nad and kakak Chacha) who helped us plan the trip by giving us tips and for letting us use your GoPro heh*

This is Iffah using Fay, my film camera! And I'm so proud that it turned out so nicely!!! I'll share them with you soon!

First stop of the day; Flinders Street Station!

Apparently, according to Afiq and Zamir (Iffah's friend's who live in Melbourne), they're in talks of tearing down the current Flinders Street Station to build a more modern and efficient train station. As you can see from here, there's a lot of train lines that pass through this station, like a train station interchange so I'm proud to say, I've visited this vibrant train station before it might get destroyed.

From Flinders Street, we tried to make our way to Hosier Lane, one of the must visit places according to every guide we read about Melbourne. Of course some might say it's overrated because it's "just a street with graffiti" (quoted from Zariff, brother to Zaki and Zamir, Iffah's friend) but vandalism is a serious thing in Singapore so I think it's worth a visit.

As mentioned above, we tried to make our way to Hosier Lane with just Google Maps but we were still unfamiliar with Melbourne... Thank goodness there were like volunteers around Flinders Street Station helping travellers like us, so we asked one of them and they were even prepared with print out maps to help us! The volunteer even suggested that we visit AC/DC Lane as well, which is also an alley with graffiti and art but more dedicated to music and rock and roll, as the name suggests hahaha

These alleys were lodged between office buildings and such, so you'll be surrounded by people wearing suits and ties and smart attire, carrying their take-away lunches to eat while they finish their reports or something. I actually liked it, observing these people in their office street style stuff, damn did they look good.

We walked around the area for a bit, just going wherever seemed cool and we ended up at Birrarung Marr, eating our cereal bars we packed from home and just people watching.
So far, we've only had our cereal bars and maybe some toast before we left home so we were reaaaally hungry hahaha
You could easily walk from one place to another in the city area, might be a little long but you could still walk. The weather was amazing so we were like eh why not just walk to Melbourne Central, which was where we planned to do some shopping and try the well known Lord of the Fries.
Nothing much happened while we walked to Melbourne Central except that we walked in the wrong direction for like 10 minutes before we realised and consulted the print out map (thank you volunteer from earlier) and made our way, the correct way to Melbourne Central and foooooodddddd!!!!!

So tbh, Lord of the Fries doesn't have the best burgers. The vegan patties were mush but the fries.... THE FRIESSSS ugh even now, I crave for the shoe-string fries.

Another must visit is the State Library of Victoria! Take the lift to the 5th floor and just admire the silence and the magnificent view!

Ended the day shopping at Melbourne Central and going over to Coles in Footscray for grocery shopping!!!

*another shoutout to Iffah, Mao and Nazirah for looking forward to my blog posts!!! I love every one of my readers!!! There aren't much of y'all but still love y'all*

That's it for Day 2! So much more stuff happening in the days to come! I'm so excited to share it with you guys! Hope you guys have enjoyed reading my posts so far!
Till next time!

xoxo
Squidkid

It's Adventure Time // ThirstyInMelb #1

Yeah, it took us 3 days to come up with this hashtag, clearly we're not creative people.
Anyhoots! It feels like I travel a lot haha but no, it's just that I get inspired to blog only after I travel.... Does this mean I should travel more? Hahaha

In the beginning of the semester, January perhaps, me and Liyana were planning to travel to Taiwan together but Iffah was like "Hey, wanna go to Australia?" and we were like *shrugs* why not?? We knew we needed to decide on a budget for our trip and we initially set it aside to SGD 1000 but increased it to SGD 1300 after some planning.

*PRO TIP FOR TRAVELING*
I honestly encourage looking up the places you wanna go online before visiting those places.
One for financial purposes, so you can estimate your budget but also to check on the operating hours! Not everything is open everyday and the timings can be pretty weird...

So back to the Melbourne trip, we took Scoot Airlines and our flight departed at 1:20am so we arrived in Melbourne Tullamarine Airport at around 10:30am. We knew a few people staying in Melbourne so we were thankful we got some tips from them. One of them is my cousin who is a cabin crew based in Melbourne and she mentioned there's this Opus store that sells SIM cards at an affordable rate. For AUD2 a day, we got 500MB of data and unlimited texts and calls to Australian numbers. That's not too bad but the bad thing was the queue, which we waited an hour for to finally get our SIM cards.

We booked an Airbnb home in Footscray and it was such a cosy place, the neighbourhood was really nice too. Okay so the Skybus which is the bus that brings you from the airport to the main city area is like $19 and when we calculated the cab ride to our place, it seemed smarter to take the cab as we were all tired anyway.

After we settled in, we were supposed to do grocery shopping but Iffah found out that Luna Park was closed for the rest of the week so we had to go as soon as we arrived.

This is one of the many shots I have of Iffah hahaha

"I don't even know why I'm so happy?"

I swear, without the SIM card, we would spend half our time there aimlessly walking because there aren't much helpful signs there so we heavily depended on Google maps, thus I highly recommend getting data there for your phone or at least get a hardcopy map.

(so the picture on the right is actually in front one of the houses on the way to the train station from our house but I wanted the format to be pretty so I put it here instead of chronological order, picture on the left is the entrance of Luna Park hahaha)

We only had 2 hours to spend there but we still decided to pay the tickets for all the rides.
We went to the mirror maze first because for some reason, there aren't any mirror mazes in Singapore????? And we were like legit idiots in the mirror maze..... Most people we know said that Luna Park is boring but honestly, me and Liyana are scaredy cats so despite the rides being lame-ass we almost shat our pants in like 2 of them; Spider and Power Surge. Like holy balls, Power Surge you'd be literally parallel to the ground with nothing but the buckle keeping you from falling what the fuhhhhhhhhh me and Liy, during the ride were like "OMFG AHHHHHHHH FUUUUUUUUQQQQQ BUT THE VIEW IS SO PRETTY (as seen above) BUT HOLY SHIIIIIIIIIT"
The Great Scenic Railway was pretty amazing too, we saw the sunset from this so that was surreal.....
The Ghost Ride was......lol hahaha

After Luna Park, Iffah's friend's, Zaki's family wanted to meet us for dinner so yayyyyy finally we were having real food since we left Singapore.
That's it for Day 1! I know doing my post by days is not the most ideal situation but I really wanted this to be informative enough for you to have a fun trip but at the same time be able to discover Melbourne on your own (thus which trams take you to where and all, not provided, also because I'm too lazy hahaha)

I hope you give me support (cheh) and look forward to the following days from my Melbourne trip!
xoxo
Squidkid