Day two in Melbourne.

I should have taken my  jacket! The wind was really cold out there. Anyway we had a good day, lots of walking. Today was my book sales day. First stop the National Library. They don't buy for all the Melbourne libraries, but I left one with the buyer there in case they want some for the National Library. Then to the 'Chinese book shop', which was quite small, but I left one there and they may stock it.

Then to Xinhua bookshop. Well this was a magnificent flop. We found the place ok. The website says it opens at 11am. The door says it opens at 11.30. In reality it opens whenever the guy feels like turning up. He rolled up about midday, spoke very limited English and using a student at the shop as an interpreter, it seems that I need to work through a Chinese publisher to get books into the Xinhua book shops. So I have some contacts, I'll work on that next.

We did the rounds on the city circle tram. This is a free tram that continuously circles the city center.

That was good, it goes round round the city, so we got a good look around. We had a coffee and sandwich and checked out the Immigration Museum. We were quite disappointed with it. The Adelaide Immigration Museum seemed to be much better, more personal stories, and just generally much more interesting.
There are some very interesting buildings around the city center.

This is the Flinders Street train station. It is the main central station for all the suburban trains.

Outside City Hall they had some lovely flower beds, with all the colder climate sorts of flowers we don't get in Queensland. Cyclamen, primulas, cyclamen. It was very pretty.

More flowers and some unusual elephants advertising the Melbourne Zoo.

Below is a very tall building. Our oldest son is a builder. When he was a new apprentice, he thought he would show off his newly acquired skills and put a shelf in his bedroom. The shelf was a triangular shape. He spent most of the day trying to get the thing to fit. In the end, Peter took over and got the measurements right, getting the shelf in the right spot in just a few minutes. This has become a family joke, talking about corner shelves. This building reminded us of that. I think he would have had some problems getting all the angles right for the corner shelves in this building. I didn't count how many floors it has, but I think about 40.

Right in the city center there was a woman with the music playing doing Tai Chi. It is very common to see men and women doing this in China, but not so usual in our Aussie cities. Mind you, there are thousands of Chinese people here, they are just everywhere.

This is part of the RMIT, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. A lovely old building, although it looks like it needs a really good clean.

So all in all, a good day, and the busiest day since we have got over our really bad colds. At least we got to do quite a lot of walking. Tomorrow, if the weather is good we'll go back to Victoria markets.