Day 256! Time for some fun on the town! Also time to start figuring out where the heck Immy and I are going to stay for a bit longer term. Sam and his family have been amazing and truly have made my time so far in Melbourne very special… but I’d love to have my own space soon! Today we started that adventure.

I woke up nice and early at 8am for my day of adventure! Immy and I had 3 houses to go and “inspect” that were potential rental properties.

They do it a bit different here than in the US. The real estate agent shows up for 20 minutes… and everyone interested comes and checks it out. It’s not you booking a time to see it with them. So there was a chance of a lot of people being there.

The first one was at 9:30am and Sam very kindly offered to drive me over to it! I’m lucky because it was cold and rainy out today (for most of the entire day).

We pit stopped at a cafe for Sam to grab a coffee and then headed over to the first house. I didn’t really take any pictures of the houses, but if we end up choosing one, I’m sure you’ll see it loads.

The first one was a beautiful little house in the Northcote suburb. It’s not the most ideal location, but it’s not bad either! We only really needed 5 minutes, but Immy was running late so we just chatted with the agent for a bit. But in the end Immy got on the wrong tram and then after getting on the right one, got off at the wrong stop.

So she just had to take my word for it that it was a nice place.

Because of the rain, Sam drove us to the second place as well. This one was in Fitzroy North. We had a bit of time to kill so we walked up and down the Main Street of this suburb. This would definitely be a fun suburb to live in, but just about everyone wants to live here so places are expensive.

The second townhouse was okay, we weren’t that big of fans and this time there were loads of people checking it out. We didn’t spend much time here because the agent couldn’t answer any of our questions and so we hustled to the nearest bus stop to try and catch a bus and then connect to another bus to get to the last location.

In the end… we just about missed the last one. We got off one bus just as the other bus was arriving at the other corner. So we saw this as a sign that this might be the place we stay since we were going to make it just in time…

This place was in North Melbourne and we caught the guy showing the place just as he was closing it up. But he was willing to let us quickly check it out.

We weren’t fans of this one at all. Not the one. It was worse than my college house, even my apartment in Thailand. There were stains everywhere, the bathroom was pretty gross too. So the best one from the day was the first one.

But we’ll keep looking!

Immy and I’s expedition for the day wasn’t done yet! Immy needed new shoes. She’s just been wearing Crocs and with the cold rainy weather today and needing to go into places to find work, she wanted better ones.

We hopped on a few more trams and busses and made our way to the South Wharf DFO, a shopping outlet.

It’s been a while since I’ve been in anywhere like this. I’ve really enjoyed just having a bag of clothes of what I need and that’s it, I will need more of specific things at some point (I’m assuming) for whatever job I get. But I don’t really understand the need for THIS much consumerism anymore.

There was such a frenzy in the air of everyone needing and wanting to buy everything. I really enjoyed my Koh Tao oasis were all I needed was a place and food and could walk around shirtless everyday 🙂

We made our way back into the city because it was time for some food! I was very hungry. I skipped out on eating at the cafe and I hadn’t really had a chance to eat since then because we were on a mission this morning.

But I was excited for this meal because I found a “hidden gem” on Reddit. There’s a place downtown, for $10 AUD you get all you can eat vegetarian and vegan Indian food. So whatever they made that day, is what you get. Today was a kidney bean and veggie curry with rice and date halava.

I will be coming here for sure because it was great and probably the cheapest and most filing meal I’ll find in Melbourne.

I believe the place is a devoted group of Hindus to the god, Krishna. Every time you receive something from them, I believe, they said “thank you Krishna.” It was quite interesting but at the very least I support their mission of providing cheap food in a very expensive city.

I then said see you later to Immy, because we were seeing each other later that night. I went back to Sam’s house and she set off to print off some CVs and look for work.

Sam and I hung out for a bit, jamming on guitar and chatting about our day. Then I went a took a 30 minute power nap before we kickstarted our night of fun!

Sam has a group of friends that all live in the Brighton area. So we made our way over to his friend Tom’s house for a night of card games and some drinking. Immy came and joined too, so we got acclimated into our first Melbourne friend group.

Sam’s friends were Ben, Chris, and Tom. All really nice guys with a mix of backgrounds! But they all went to high school together (minus Sam). I believe Sam met them through playing tennis.

We watched a bit of Australian football before going out and made our way into, the now rainless, cold towards Chapel St.

We had a fun time bar hopping down a very busy bar street. We sat and chatted at some bars and danced at others. We eventually made our way to one of the “classic” post bar meal places on the street and got an HSP (Halal Snack Pack).

It was the perfect way to end the night! We had to walk back to the train station in the cold… then walk back to Sam’s house from the stop, in the cold. Did I say it was cold?

It was a wonderful night, but the weather is making me miss Koh Tao a lot. BUT I’m going to stick out Melbourne for a bit longer and see what happens.

Tomorrow Immy and I are going to apply for the first house we toured, we’ll see how it goes!

– Elie