Melbourne: Australia's 2nd biggest city

Since the trip wasn’t packed enough, I decided that traveling to Australia and not seeing the second most populated city was not going to happen, so Kathryn & I squeezed in a two-day Melbourne trip after the Great Barrier Reef and before New Zealand. As Australia's second largest city, the population is growing so fast that it may soon overtake Sydney.

As you could imagine, we were physically exhausted. I hadn’t been home in nearly four weeks at this point, and while we did research, it wasn’t like we had a concrete agenda of places and times. I even asked if we could Uber everywhere. That may have impacted my opinion of Melbourne as a city, but by the end of it, I’m very fond of everything we saw and happy we got to see what it had to offer.

Rather than comparing Melbourne to one specific city, the best comparison Kathryn came up with is that Sydney is the Manhattan of New York City, while Melbourne is the Brooklyn. It’s hip, the coffee shop and restaurant culture is huge and the people who live there love it. It appeared to have everything the best of other cities have I have visited have to offer- with parks like Montreal, a Sydney vibe downtown / in the CBD, and a Chicago lakefront path feel on its beaches, and a clean and silent overall feel.

Some landmarks we saw while there:

View of the Melbourne skyline from Federation Square. Nearby we popped in the National Gallery of Victoria, that has the largest stain glassed ceiling 

Outside the Royal Botanical Gardens

Hosier Lane - an alley full of unique graffiti not too far from Federation Square

Manchester Press- a popular café in Melbourne’s coffee shop culture. There were even birds flying around next to us.

The Fitzroy & Prahran areas were my favorite, with an essential stop at a rooftop with tapas called Naked for Satan. Another food recommendation is brunch at Top Paddock, which Kathryn received from a woman on the subway in NYC. It lived up to its expectation!

The best end to Melbourne is that one of Kathryn’s Mizzou friends happens to live here and took us out in his suburb- Prahran. It was very similar to the Newtown suburb where I stayed in Sydney - a main street called Chapel Street full of restaurants, bars and shopping. This definitely made us feel more at home there and enjoying what it had to offer for your average 20-something resident.