Today we were planning on chasing Melbourne’s Christmas lights and decorations as we’re only one week away from this cosy holiday, also called the ‘silly season’ here. As we were mostly interested in the lights and projections we headed off for a little beachin’ first and take our Christmas beach pictures. No, I won’t show them just yet! But for my first Christmas in warm temperatures this is something I absolutely had to do. We tried it already last week when it was 35 degrees, Arno picked me up from work, but when we arrived at the beach, it was packed. There wasn’t a square meter available so we didn’t feel truly comfortable joining the crowd with our Christmas hats on.. Yet this time, luck was on our side.
When arriving on the beach Arno noticed a solar halo (oh yes I googled that) in the sky, I never heard of such thing but holy moly that is so unbelievably cool! Sorry, I can’t really explain the phenomenon but it has something to do with ice crystals. I took a picture with my phone but obviously I couldn’t see what I was shooting and it was too big to fit entirely in the picture but hey, pretty decent result.
So afterwards we started our tram journey into the city and stopped for Burgers and Concrete and Betty’s Burgers. I believe this was the first place we ate out in Melbourne, they have delicious burgers and concrete. Whoot concrete? Apparently this is a typical American dessert, a custard ice-cream (custard is like our pudding) topped with whatever you like. Last time I couldn’t handle them yet, but today I deliberately ate a veggie burger so I could conquer a concrete afterwards. Wow, quite heavy as you guessed already but pretty damn good!
When we started to stroll the city searching for jolly decorations we were astonished to end up in a huge Santa party in the middle of Bourke Street. About 40 people dressed up as Santa or Christmas trees (oh yes you read it correctly!) were dancing the streets on some great 80’s tunes. It’s like they met up especially for our vlog, this was awesome!
Only a little but further we stumbled upon something I still can’t really grasp. Myer is a huge store comparable to Macy’s, Inno, Bijenkorf, you know, every country has one of these.. Yet the storefronts of Myer are decorated with moving objects so that they each tell a story, it’s stunning, it really is. Yet people are actually lining up to stroll by these windows, and not just a couple of meters, those lines were easily 50 meters long. TO LOOK AT A STOREFRONT, I take this as exhibit number 326 that Australians are incredibly honest and friendly people. I can only imagine what it would be like in Belgium, ha ha, I’m not even going to elaborate on that.
Anyway we were walking towards the first video mapping show at the State Victoria Library. I always love these kind of projections, they’re so incredibly made, even the tiniest details. The story continued on Federation Square so we headed off that way and noticed that its Christmas tree also performed a nice light show. At Federation Square they put up a couple of popular selfie props like a decorated tunnel and a huge Christmas-lighted-bauble. All pretty cosy, yet no mulled wines or hot cocos here, ice-cream pops are good too I guess. The video mapping show here was less awesome than the Library in our opinion, there’s quite some space at that square yet they only projected on a small piece of it. Anyway, still fun to look at!
Conclusion? They do a pretty good job, I mean they’re trying. Yet, of course nothing beats the Christmas markets we know in Europe. Protected with scarves, jackets and gloves, sipping on a mulled wine while enjoying some Raclette or Poffertjes, that’s the good stuff!