Melbourne gardens and museum.

May 21

We began the morning listening to the movie Bob took of the kookaburra serenade on our last day in Tassie. Fortified with muesli and yogurt  we set out to explore the Royal Melbourne Botanical Gardens. 
We walked along the Yarra River where we saw rowing clubs and sculls out for a morning row.

We must have walked almost every track in that park and spent a lot of time with our binoculars and bird book.

View from Guilfoyle's Volcano.

Inside the greenhouse.

We added some new birds to our list and Bob had fun taking lots of photos of a kookaburra. It was a sunny but cool day so all that walking was a good thing.

We climbed up into the large Shrine of Remembrance, a war memorial that had great views all over the city.

View form the top of the Shrine of Remembrance.

We wove our way back to our hotel with a few stops for more gift shopping. Bob rested while I did more blogging and photo uploading. Our plan for dinner was to find Lygon Street, we had some trouble and ended up walking for about an hour before we found it. It is known for it's Italian restaurants. We picked one at random, Bob had a nice whole soft shell crab sauce over spaghetti and I had an ordinary cannelloni stuffed with spinach and ricotta.

May 22

The weather was cold with a few showers in the morning. We were glad that the Queen Victoria Market was mostly enclosed. We headed over there for a more relaxed perusal of all the food there. Lots of fresh seafood, whole fish, meats of all kinds, amazing cheeses, breads, pastries, deli fare, fruits and vegetables...my kind of heaven as you can imagine.

Bob loved these sandwiches with the eggs on top.

Amazing chocolates.

One giant crab !!

Lots of odd prepared meats.

We took lots of great photos, bought cheeses, pastries, wine, and more raw oysters. Bob tried his first meat pie and loved it. We dropped our purchases back at the hotel and headed out to walk to the Melbourne Museum.
The architecture in this city is so varied, one street will have ornate Victorian buildings and across the street will be something ultra modern. We came across Drummond St. by luck and were enchanted by it's buildings. Shades of New Orleans ??

The Melbourne Museum is a combination of Melbourne history, natural history and Aboriginal heritage. We started with the history of Melbourne, it was a very good combination of displays and text that spotlighted points of historical interest through the decades. Their history is similar to that of California, with gold rushes, mechanization, social issues and economic depressions.
We took a break at the museum cafe for lunch then entered the Forest Gallery, a multistory indoor forest. We got to see a Satin Bower bird, busy at work on his bower, a ground nest he must build to entice the female to mate.

Satin Bower bird in the Forest Gallery of the Melbourne Museum.

We thought we would just spend a short time in the natural history section...their insect exhibit was the best Bob had ever seen. We spent at least an hour looking through the rooms of amazing displays of both, live, dead and models of insects and other arthropods.

We thought we would not spend long in their multi-tiered two story room of mammals, wrong again. While I am not a fan of taxidermied specimens, this room had the most amazing touch screens, large ones with the animals you were seeing right on them. A young girl showed us how to work them. You would touch an animal  and the screen would open a window with the animal's  range and level of endangerment.

Around the room were smaller touch screens on pivots that you could point at an animal, touch and get even more information about habitat, diet, etc...we were in awe. Another hour went by as we enjoyed this very cool technology. It was hard to leave this museum without having seen the rest of their displays. We were saturated and needed to do a bit more souvenir shopping before heading back to the hotel.
We were so glad we had purchased another dozen oysters at the market in the morning. We ate them slowly this time savoring each one. That was our "entree" which is what they call appetizers here in Oz. Bob was too tired to go out again so I slipped out and bought some takeout sushi and seaweed salad to complete our dinner.