I woke up at nearly 7 when the daylight started peeking through the shades. The skies were kinda gloomy. Got back into bed and continued writing my ejournal so that I could upload this into my blog later. I had not been able to catch up on updating the blog lately and was still in the midst of updating on the Taiwan trip we had in November last year, due to being busy in work commitments and simply laziness. This trip slow pace allowed for time to pen down the moments of the trip (this and the previous ones). I turned on the heating again as it felt a little too cold even under the sheets while my loved ones seemed unperturbed in their sleep.
K asked for milk which I got out of bed to fix one up. It was snooze time after that. Guess we were all still on Singapore time, at least for both mommy and K as I continued to work on my blog till I fell asleep myself. The next thing I knew we were all awoken at 930am.
The usual routine was mommy to cook the lunch meal while I get K prepared. After packing his meals into containers, we were all ready to leave at 1045am, incredibly late while on holiday but we were expecting a slow pace one.
To the left on La Trobe street was a tram station and since it was within the free tram locations, we hopped on tram 35, one that was particularly routed for tourist to get into town. We hopped off the station on Queen’s street for the a visit to Queen Victoria Market.
It was a short 5mins walk from the tram station which brought us to a huge area, hundreds of stalls selling all kinds of stuff, under one big roof. It was a mega size pasar malam, Aussie style. Much of the things sold though, we weren’t really interested and just keep moving and looking. There weren’t many Aussie products though there were some woollen products, oboriginal wooden stuff and paintings, koalas soft toy. As we took about an hour to walk around and after looking at a street presentation of Indonesian culture with their instruments and dance, we went for lunch at the food court next to the market.
I bought myself a big breakfast with latte from a stall (Q75) inside at aud14.5 and it was not bad. Mommy had a bowl of pumpkin soup in a bread bowl from one of the stalls (The Soup Factory) in the market. K had his pasta and some of my fried egg which he liked but not the mushrooms.
After lunch, we used the toilets and changed K diapers, we walked to the tram station on Elizabeth street to take a tram to the final stop at Flinders’ street. Flinder street station was huge and had a clock tower than K mistaken as Big Ben. We walked along Flinder street towards Federation Square. There was a Sikh exhibition going around but K preferred to spend his time climbing up and down the flight of stairs. We chilled in this beautiful place for a while, where we could also see the big St Paul’s cathedral before visiting the Melbourne tourist center nearby to ask for the nearest Telstra shop.
When I turned on the wifi whilst in the shop, I was surprised to find free public wifi! Logged on and found by google maps that the nearest Telstra were just 2 streets down at a mall called the Block arcade. We walked towards the location and within 10mins we were there. As I kept K busy and myself took a seat after carrying my heavy toddler around, mommy purchased data SIM for aud40 that would give us 3GB of data, should be enough to tide us through the next 15days. The mall itself looked great in the vintage design but we didn’t visit and walked back to the tram station to take tram 35 return to the apartment. There was supposed to be a Parliament House but since everyone was tired, we decided to skip that.
The tram brought us behind the Etihad stadium where we got off as it left for the waterfront. At this time, K had already fallen asleep in my arms. I had to carry him all the way back to the apartment, a good 10 mins walk and it was really tiring. Had to stop and rest for a bit while mommy couldn’t even carry him a while. By the time we were back, it was already 4pm. Mommy made milk for him and I cleaned up some dishes. Then we all took an afternoon nap after K woke up, downed some milk and returned to nap.
520pm and we woke from our nap. Mommy prepared dinner and K prepared for a bath, and as usual with kids, it took awhile to get them moving to the bathroom. It was also quite challenging keep them from getting a cold when getting out of the bath especially in this cold winter day, we had to switched on the air heater to warm up the rooms first (aircon on the heating mode).
Once we were done with our preparations, and trying to get K to stop his YouTube video, we headed towards Newquay for dinner at about 7pm. It was about a 15mins walk, could have been faster if not for K insistence to press every traffic light button along the way there. We stopped by the waterfront to take some photos of the bridge and continued to along Newquay promenade to see if what were available for dinner. There were a couple of restaurants from Asian cuisines to western to choose from. Along the way were a few art structures that K spent time climbing and jumping on the lights on the ground.
We reached the end of the promenade and decided that we wanted Chinese and thus returned back to Docklands Lotus restaurant for our dinner. The restaurant had some opening hours indicated but not for Sunday and there was only one family eating there. When asked if there were still opened, they checked and since it was just 730pm, they said of course! I assumed they were opened till the same timing of at least 10pm.
The restaurant had toddler seat (the usual IKEA one) which was good as it kept K still and some fish tanks to keep him entertained. We ordered Fried rice and Ee Foo noodles and they came in huge portions. While K ate the rice prepared by mommy, he too shared my fried rice and I shared mommy’s as she couldn’t finish eating hers. All this we paid for aud38.1.
Left the restaurant and K spent some time looking at the fishes before leaving to the nearby art structures to climb around. The difference now was that the cold wind became unbearably colder than before and as we tried to persuade K to leave, he was still playing around the strictures. He also found time to crap (as he didn’t for the last 3days) and I had to carry him the 15mins ( with the traffic lights) back to the apartment. Upon arrival, I quickly changed his diapers out and gave him some TV time with Ironman 2 on 7mate channel.
After packing a bit in preparation for our move the next day, we got into bed at 10ish pm, a return back to normalcy.