Thursday, February 07, 2008

Sarah's Excellent Melbourne Adventure

Greetings from a city that currently has temperatures in the early 20s. Haha boy am I glad to have escaped the relentless Perth heat for a few days!

Yes, I managed to find an internet cafe and do a post to let you all know I am alive and well.

The library conference is pretty good. Some of the talks are a bit boring but you get that. I even fell asleep in a couple and woke up when I felt my head tipping forwards. Spending three days with over a thousand librarians can be a bit full on. There are two other people from my uni there plus a few other Perthites that I recognised from...um....Perth ;) Most of the time I am content to be a loner and just do my own thing. I hate mingling and small talk for the sake of 'networking' and most people seem to have their token friend or group that they hang with mostly. However I have met a few people at the Tuesday evening welcome reception with drinks. I reckon they must think that if they plaster librarians with alcohol then they will talk to each other. It's a bit sad that people will only talk when they're tipsy/drunk but that's a topic for another post.

There are quite a few 'stereotypical' librarians but then there are others with piercings, wicked clothes and coloured hair which defy the stereotype.

Basically a typcial day at the conference goes like this:
Talks and eating, talks and eating, more talks and more eating.

That's why I'm enjoying walking everywhere in the city.

I was so happy that my presentation went really well yesterday. People seemed to like it and even asked questions.

Some more observations of Melbourne:
  • Melbourne has these cool little toilets in the CBD. They are silver with sliding doors and self-flushing and self-washing cubicles. I sat down on a wet seat and thought 'Yuck, someone peed over the seat and didn't wipe it' but then I realised that the toilets automatically wash themselves. You can't stay in there too long otherwise the 'wash cycle' will begin.
  • There is graffiti EVERYWHERE...it's much worse than Perth. Not art graffiti - disgusting tagging graffiti, especially in the Fitzroy area. I don't know that teenagers can claim to be bored in Melbourne when there's so much more to do.
  • A lot of the buildings look pretty rundown but I guess it's part of Melbourne's charm.
  • I saw Rebel Wilson in a restaurant in Carlton.
  • The convention centre has self flushing loos and sometimes they flush while you're still on there.
  • There are 7/11s (24 hour convenience stores) everywhere!
  • There is a Neighbours shop in the city. You can buy Neighbours merchandise and go on tours of the locations where the show is filmed. Since I'm not a Neighbours fan, I think it's pretty sad.

Bye for now. Will post again soon with photos.

3 comments:

bek said...

I'm glad your having fun!

Anonymous said...

Dude, we've got those loos too. For example there's one on the corner of The Esplanade and Barrack Street. And one on one side of Russell Square in Northbridge. I think they're marvellous. Some of them play music. One of them, can't rember where it was, even thanked me for using it.

Sarah said...

Whoa, really? I'll have to try them out.