The kids and I have just returned from a few days visiting my mum/their granny in my old home town, Melbourne. We took them on an outing to a Build a Bear shop on Thursday (a bit of a rip-off but Mum was paying ;) ) and on Friday to visit their Great Nana (aka 'Little Nana') in her nursing home. On Saturday we decided to be tourists in our own town and took the kids on a tram ride into the city.
I think my son quite enjoyed being on the tram but my daughter moaned most of the way about how slow it was and kept 'accidentally on purpose' elbowing, squashing and generally annoying her brother (note evil glint in eyes in above photo).
We got off at Flinders Street Station at the end of the very long tram ride and spent 20 minutes or so watching a buskerin Federation Square. The kids thought he was hilarious and my son tried to give him some M&M's at the end of the performance (as his sister was the one entrusted with the money to go into the busker's hat).
(You can see a tram like the one we caught in the background of this photo).
There was a whole lot of Chinese stuff going on elsewhere in Federation Square (from the flags and other paraphenalia, I gathered it was mostly pro-Beijing Olympics related). Kids tend to spend a lot of time in Chinatown in Sydney (daughter even marched in the Chinese New Year parade this year with her Kung Fu group) so not as impressed with the dragons as I thought they would be:
My son and I then went and visited the NGV's Ian Potter Centre (free bits only) while Mum and my daughter went and got themselves a "cup of chino". There was some kind of gaming exhibition on at one of the other exhibition spaces. We didn't go to it but did stop and say 'hello' to Super Mario:
We then walked up to my brother's apartment which is near this historic Melbourne building called the Forum:
Not sure what the Forum is used for these days. Back when I lived in Melbourne, it had fallen into disrepair and was being used by some religious organisation (the Scientologists I think) as their Melbourne HQ. think it is back to being used as a performance space again now and is typical of the revival of Melbourne itself in the past few decades.
Kids had a great time at Uncle M's. Will post more on that and on the rest of the Melbourne trip later.
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