Day 292: Treasure Hunting

In the morning my host was going to visit a friend and gave me a ride to Chapel Street, which is one of the major commercial areas and was between the neighborhood I was staying and the city center. I had an early lunch at a noodle restaurant and checked out a few shops in the area that caught my eye as I slowly worked my way north up the street, but I didn't spend too long in the area. Once I reached the Yarra River I followed along a path beside it until I got into the city near Federation Square.

My first stop in the city core was to visit the other half of the National Victoria Gallery - the international collection. I enjoyed it more than the Australia collection, which isn't a huge surprise since it obviously had a wider variety covering a longer period of history.

After the gallery my true hunt of the day began. Melbourne is another of the great street art cities of the world, and I set out to find the best places for it I could. Early on in my exploring I noticed some art down a covered alley and popped into it to look around, and was followed by a curious girl. She was also a traveller, from Switzerland, and was surprised because she had walked by this alley 4 or 5 times before and never noticed the art. My secret, I explained, was that I had a treasure map! I had spent the previous evening researching things to check out in town, both for street art and restaurants, galleries, shops and other little bits of interest. I had marked these on a city map and worked out a general route to go through everything. This specific alley wasn't actually one of the ones marked on my map, but when your mind is set on exploring and discovering interesting out of the way places it becomes much easier to notice things like that. My Swiss companion, having nothing better to do, joined me in my hunt and we spent the rest of the afternoon exploring streets and alleyways. Sometimes we'd wander off my marked trail as something caught our eye, and often led to something else, but we'd always work our way back and continue on.

I'm going to leave the collection of actual art for a post or two later, since there's so much of it, but suffice to say there was a lot of it, and some of it in pretty out of the way places.

After dinner it was already getting dark. I wandered back along the river to where all the stadiums are, and watched a bit of the Australian Open qualifiers (where people try to earn a place in the tournament) from afar.