Chris's Random Ramblings

Mon, 17 Oct 2005 - Melbourne Weekend

We headed off on Friday to Melbourne for a weekend of food (actually Kelly's 30th birthday). On Saturday for lunch we went to the Flower Drum with her parents. It has a reputation as one of the best restaurants in Melbourne, in the top 50 around the world, and I definitely enjoyed the experience. The service was excellent, we had the best Peking Duck I've ever tasted, and the rest of the dishes were also very good.

For dinner we went to the Banana Palm, a great Malaysian restaurant. I had Bumbu Ikan, a whole flounder deep fried with five spice, ginger and chillies - a very yummy dish with surprisingly few bones which I normally find annoying when eating fish.

On Sunday, since I've never been to a Gold Class cinema, Kelly took me to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at the cinemas at Crown Casino. Although not cheap, it was a great experience with comfy reclining chairs and food delivered during the movie. Unfortunately there aren't any Gold Class cinemas in Canberra, rather strange given that even Ballarat has one. We spent some time walking around the casino (Vegas-lite) area before flying back to Canberra in the evening.

[/travel/melbourne] link

Sun, 07 Mar 2004 - Melbourne I'm on an unexpected work trip to Melbourne - it wasn't organised till Friday afternoon and I flew down Saturday morning. There is a little car race on this weekend so the city is rather busy. The hotel I'm staying at is quite close to Albert park and there quite a few people invovled in the race at breakfast this morning. Had a crash course in java virtual machines and websphere yesterday. Now I remember why I like to have source code available when debugging problems.

Note to self: Always bring an umbrella when travelling to Melbourne.

[/travel/melbourne] link