Mornington Peninsular, Part 3

When I read Jane Austen's unfinished novel Sanditon, I couldn't, for the life of me, picture how a bathing machine looked like. After a bit of googling, I found out that bathing machines evolved into bathing boxes and Melbourne had bathing boxes! I was determined to find some on this trip. We didn't get to the more famous stretch in Brighton but the Mornington Peninsular ones did very nicely.

And just to round up the Morning Peninsular and Australia collection of photos, here's an aerial view of the Peninsular from Murray's Lookout. I would love to explore more of the Peninsular next time, taking a long slow trip through. I am going to start posting non-travel photos going forward (finally!), I have such a huge backlog that I am going to have to learn to be selective. If you like my travel series, don't worry, I am going to be off to Taipei in 28 days, there will be lots more to come!

A bit of a life update, I have had a few tough weeks at work, where I have been working a minimum of 12 hours everyday. It's not likely to get any easier and I am trying my best to put on a good face, keep my head down and deal with it as best as I could. Not going to lie, there were a couple of moments when I almost lost it but I managed to rein myself in. This is definitely one of the most trying period of my work life,  and I tell myself everyday that this is a test and that I will prevail. Wish me luck.

Mornington Peninsular, Part 2

For lunch on the Mornington Peninsular, our tour brought us to the Ashcombe Maze & Lavender Gardens. While lavenders are pretty to look at and smell, I can tell you it is not good in food, especially ice cream! I felt like I was drinking scented soap! Never again!

After lunch, we headed out to the lavender and rose gardens for photographs. So lovely wandering among all these flowers, something that I would never be able to do at home.

Once again, I am awed by the Velvia 50 film, the colours of the flowers are at once true to form but yet so much deeper and richer. And the rays of light shining through the petals, it feels almost luminous. If only E-6 processing was cheaper, I would do it more often.

Mornington Peninsular, Part 1

With the promise of blue skies and spectacular scenearies for our day trip to the Mornington Peninsular, I knew I had to choose a special film to document the day. I decided to use one of my favourite slides, the Fuji Velvia 50 and double down by processing this film the way it should be with E-6 processing. 

I was thrilled at the roll turned out, from the second I received my film back, I couldn't stop looking at how beautiful the colours were and how much more depth there seems to be in each image. There seems to be a bit of a purple tinge i some of them but I don't mind them, I find it adds to the unpredictability of the slide film. I look forward to experimenting more with E-6 processing but I will have to do it sparingly because it's much more expensive than the common C-41 process.

We booked a day tour with Gray Line Tours. It was a simple online process but you have to call them up a couple of days in advance to make sure the tour is running on the day you want it because they have a minimum quota to fill. The original date we wanted was below quota and we had to shift our itinerary around a little. We had to do the tour on our last full day in Melbourne instead of in the middle. The tour was a fairly comfortable size, about 10ish people which makes for lots of space on the coach for everyone to sprawl about to their heart's content.

We headed out of Melbourne via St Kilda, along the shoreline, where the tour guide kept a rambling spiel about the development of St Kilda. As we passed by Albert Park, I was really thrilled to find out that some of the roads we traversed were part of the F1 Melbourne Grand Prix circuit! (Little known fact about me, I am a Formula 1 racing fan!) It was a bit of a drive towards Mornington Peninsular and our first stop was for Devonshire Tea at Arthur's Seat. It's just so elegant to have tea with scones, and with that lovely view from the windows.

After tea, we headed to the strawberry fields to pick our little box of fruits. It was a fun experience picking the strawberries, trying to find the brightest, reddest and ripest fruits to bring home. Strawberries taste so much better when picked by your own hands!

More about Mornington in the next post...

Fish on Fire, Glebe

Our stomachs decided that for our last night in Sydney, we needed to have another serving of oh-so-fresh fish & chips like the one we ate on our first day. So we found a good wifi spot and set to googling on our iphones for seafood in Glebe. We quickly found Fish on Fire. It's a small place, for quick meals and take-outs rather than lingering over the very very delicious seafood. We ordered a Mix Seafood Grill and a Fish & Chips to share. I can tell you, our tummies were very very happy.

P/S: I just realised Google Friend Connect was officially retired on 1 March. So here we have a Bloglovin' follow button in its place. Follow me there. Or else just copy and paste my blog url into your Google Readers.

Clipper Cafe, Glebe

Clipper Cafe was one of the first places that was featured as part of Coffee Table People's Cafespotting feature. So you can imagine how excited we were that one of us would be able to make it to the cafe in real life! I even made sure to load my camera with my favourite film, Fuji Velvia 50, so that I could take as best the photographs I could. And boy, did this cafe not disappoint.

We got there in the late afternoon, about an hour before closing, to a half-empty cafe. We were immediately charmed by the decor of the place, made even prettier by the rays of sunlight from golden hour.

After a whole day of feasting and the time being really close to another dinner feast, we decided to share a sandwich and get a drink each. Memory fails me but I think we had some sort of ham & cheese panini. This is a wonderfully atmospheric place so if you have an afternoon free while you are in Sydney, please take a walk down to Glebe and visit Clipper!

Spring in Glebe

The last few days has been really grey and dreary so to remember the sunlit afternoon that we spent in Glebe last November was a joy. It's been a very lazy Sunday for me. I woke up early (after an uncharacteristically early night), started to read through my google reader (sorely neglected after hectic days at work lately) and watching Craig Ferguson on youtube. When the rain came, I switched to a book and eventually drifted into a nap. Now, I am just passing the time before I begin to prepare for dinner with friends.