cheryl goes global: Day 4: Satan's Fury in Melbourne

As I alluded to in the post about Day 3... we got a bit burnt during our walk from Bondi to Coogee and our time on Coogee Beach. This made for a relatively painful first day in Melbourne. Especially as the high was 104... hence why we nicknamed it Satan's Fury because that's how it felt on our skin.

We woke up pretty early and decided to check out the city, so we walked towards the river and some of the places we thought could be potential New Year's Eve destinations. Because of Satan's Fury and our sunburn, most of our walk was spent trying to find the shadiest path to our destination.

We walked all the way to the opposite side of the Yarra River to South Wharf which was a really cool district with some awesome shops and restaurants. Melbourne has done a really good job of building out the riverfront, and it looked amazing!

Aftet getting breakfast at a cool cafe we decided to walk towards the sporting side of Melbourne. We braved the sweltering heat and made it all the way to Rod Laver Arena only to find out there won't be any tours until after the Australian Open is over, which was quite disappointing seeing as the tournament doesn't even start for a another couple weeks. So we went to Melbourne Cricket Ground and got a tour there.

Cricket is a huge sport in Australia but we don't really know much about it. And even after having a good guide to show us around, we still don't know much about it. Here's what I do know: you have a bowler who throws the ball towards the batter who is guarding the wicket. The bowler wants to hit the wicket, the batter wants to protect it by knocking the ball as far as possible so he can get runs. 100 runs for a batter is a century, and you get 6 runs for a "home run" aka a ball that gets hit outside the grounds. We also learned that there are different types of matches, some take around 3 hours, others like the test matches can take up to 5 days. All I know is no way I'd be able to watch that for 5 days.

After that we we took a turn in the National Sports Museum which had memorabilia and stories from Aussie sports history. It was pretty awesome, espeically the interactive parts where you could "play" some of the sports. We did Archery, tried punting a rugby ball, played some net ball, and tested our reflexes.

Once we tired of that, we decided it was time to get some lunch and then a nap, so we walked back towards our hotel. We found a place called Vapiano's which was a delicious build you own kind of italian place. Delicioso!

And then we braved the heat to make it back to our hotel where we fell asleep for about 2 hours before we got ready for New Years. We decided to save our money and not buy a package at a club and celebrated with some champagne in our room before venturing to an area called the Docklands to watch the fireworks. There was a big crowd there already but we were able to find some good spots to watch the show.

After the fireworks and testing out one of the clubs, we decided we should get something to eat since we hadn't had anything since lunch so we went hunting for a kebab place. Our hotel concierge told us where one was that might be open but apparently he was lying because we never found it. We did find a pizza place, however, so pizza it was. I had a supreme pizza and it was actually pretty good, but that could also have been my ravenous hunger making anything seem delicious.

And so ended our first full day in Melbourne.

Note: Unfortunately, due to my phone being stolen, I am missing some photos so the below are the only ones I have for today, and are some of the ones we have from our NYE shenanigans. If I'm able to recover more photos at any point, I'll add them in later!