After a lazy start to the morning we headed up to the Queen Victoria Markets with blue sky's above our heads. After abut 20 minutes on an unsuccessful Google Maps wild goose chase, for a recommended coffee spot, we arrived at the "largest markets in the southern hemisphere"! 
This is a phrase you hear a lot in Australia but as our guide pointed out yesterday only 10% of the world's population live in the southern hemisphere. There are also a large number of third world countries so it's not the biggest accolade!
The market is more of a wholesale style market than say a Borough Market food stalls style but it's a lovely walk around. It's lovely too to see people doing their weekly shops here! As we're only here for another day we weren't looking for any fresh produce but we enjoyed the stalls and got a coffee and pastries.
As well as food the market had a huge clothing and jewelery section. Carly managed to find a butterfly charm to sit on her bracelet alongside her turtle. We were tempted by some of the art stalls but it's tricky to get things home and we didn't love anything enough to make a purchase.
We headed off to grab some brunch and settled on our second choice. Being a Saturday morning town was buzzing so we decided not to wait for half an hour on a table at our first choice very popular cafe. The food and coffee were both lovely, I had a lovely baked egg dish with flatbreads and Italian sausage.
We popped into the half price hut at the town hall but nothing caught our eye for the theatre tonight so we headed on through town. We met the girls that we had travelled with in Vietnam at a Craft Beer bar! They chose it for me so I'd obviously made an impression on them with my main hobby!
It was so lovely to catch up with them and discuss our travels and our time in Oz and Melbourne. Having their food and drink tips has been invaluable and it was great to discuss how many we'd managed to visit.
They've both lived and worked in London previously so it was lovely to swap stories and we plan on keeping in touch. They were off to a friend's birthday party but before they left we managed to get them to help us with an itenenrary for Tasmania. They both grew up there so know all the best sites to visit!
We stayed on at the bar for a while after they left and managed to get three accomodation spots booked up for our time in Tassie where we fly tomorrow. We popped up onto the rooftops next to the bar after we'd finished. One of the girls has an allotment up there, called 'Colin', above a car park overlooking the city. It's an amazing spot next to the river overlooking the business high rise buildings
.
We had intended to visit the Shrine of Remembrance which is on the southbank overlooking the city. As we got there though it was closing time and people were leaving the visitor centre. We managed to quickly nip in the memorial but didn't get to see all the info. It's a beautiful spot though overlooking the city and a fitting memorial to Australia troops who have lost their lives in conflicts since WW1.
We wandered back through the botanical gardens which were beautiful! We've had amazing full on time in Melbourne but there's definitely still more we wold love to have explored. We wandered through a small section of the gardens and enjoyed the late afternoon sun.
Back at the hostel we had doughnuts, Tim tams and tea before chilling back in the room and sorting the blog. We headed back out before I fell asleep and went for a ride around the city on one of the free trams. The tourist circle tram is great, you get a message every stop with info on the surrounding area and what you can see out of the windows!
Having eaten a few too many tim tams earlier we didn't need a big dinner so went to our final Melbourne recommendation, a Mexican called Fonda (not to be confused with a fish called wanda!) We shared some amazing tacos and I had a really lovely Spanish style beer. Cleverly named Sir Veza!
Bags packed and alarms set for 5am we're off to bed now ready for our trip to Tasmania.
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