A Few Things... To Love About Melbourne

I was a very lucky girl turning 29 this year (shhhh!!).  Not only was I spoilt rotten with some beautiful, thoughtful gifts (some of which were waiting for me at home) and a multitude with phone calls, emails and text messages from friends and family all over the word, but I was in Melbourne - one of the coolest cities I have been to, and most definitely my favourite Australian city.  Sorry Sydney-siders, but it’s true.  How lucky am I being able to tack on a quick visit on the side of a work trip?  And to be wined and dined by some fabulous friends!

Here are a few reasons I love Melbourne:

1.  Coffee so good it can respark any flat battery... and for $3.50

2.  Vintage shopping – really, it basically doesn’t exist in Singapore and especially in my considerably-larger-than-devastatingly-petite-non-Asian size

3.  Graffiti street art – it’s around every brick-lined corner

Just one of the many graffiti art works around Melbourne - Flinders Lane is famous for it

4.  Terraced housing – so gorgeously cute

Row after row of gorgeous terraced housing - and so many renovation opportunities!

5.  Heidi Museum of Modern Art

My friend Kate and I (note warm winter clothing)

This piece hit a farm-girl soft spot - a cow, and corrogated iron

6.  Books for Cooks – mecca for anyone who likes to cook, think floor to ceiling and wall to wall shelves of culinary bliss (a thought: what’s the appropriate abbreviation for the cross between culinary and literary? Cliterary? Culiterary? Lickerary?!)

And here are a few things I love about winter (something I sorely miss in Singapore)

• Stepping outside to a crisp winter blue-sky day and seeing your breath fog
• Sitting outside enjoying a cafe lunch in the sunshine without breaking into a sweat

Smoked beans from De Clieu cafe, tastes even better in the chilly sunshine

• Drinking red wine which doesn’t need to be refrigerated to be enjoyed
• Actually feeling like a red wine
• Winter dressing – not many reasons to wear my leather jacket, a scarf, hat and boots in the tropics

In parting, you know you’re in Australia when a ‘warm winter’ male street style can be interpreted as shorts and jandals with longish socks pulled up (socks are the ‘warm winter’ part).