Melbourne – Day 1 – Melbourne Central

Checking into the Pegasus Apart’Hotel @ A’Beckett Street was quick, and the paperwork had already been prepared before our arrival. Interestingly, we were not required to pay the $200 security deposit for incidentals. Rather, our incidental deposit was $1 using credit card. Our room though wasn’t ready for us at 1130hrs – normal check-in is at 1500hrs – so the luggage got dropped off and we got round to exploring our first stop: Melbourne Central.

Like other western cities, the Melbourne city center is arranged in a grid where streets cross each other in perpendicular angles, so it’s pretty easy to navigate oneself around. And with GPS and offline Google Maps (even if you had no data SIM cards), it would really take quite a lot to get lost. The weather was a 14°C – which is actually quite bearable if you’ve got a jacket – but it’s the wind that can make things chilly.

Wheeling Peter’s stroller is also easy enough from the relative absence of stepped up ledges along the pavements, so it was a pleasant 10 minute walk to Melbourne Central. The midsize Melbourne Central Shopping Center sits on top of Melbourne Central Station, and has a somewhat small Coles supermarket in the basement, and a fairly large foodcourt on the second floor that offers a variety of international cuisines – Thai, Japanese, Asian, and Western from an immediate glance. Tables were easily available, even though this was the solid lunch time crowd.

I reckon we’ve been spoiled with local foodcourt pricing, as returning to Australia reminded me again of how expensive eating and dining can be, even for what one would normally consider as street-fare. A pork Katsudon bowl like this cost nearly AUD10. No price to the resolution of hunger though, and the food was pretty decently done too.

The eye-catching and centerpriece of the mall is Coop’s Shot Tower, a nine-story high structure that sits inside the mall and stretches towards the mall’s glass dome – itself at 20 floors high and considered to be the world’s largest glass structure. Pretty impressive sight.

Tummies filled, the next stop was the State Library of Victoria. The small lawn is apparently a popular spot for lunch-time crowds, and there is also a large chessboard for passerbys to have a go. The library itself comprises numerous reading rooms, though we reckon that many visitors would likely zero in on the La Trobe Reading Room with its impressive high-ceiling dome. The Room is viewable from different vantage points, and looks quite different at ground level (level 2) compared to the highest level 6.

The Reading Rooms were filled with what looked mostly like college and University students, few of them actually reading library books. The majority of patrons we saw were largely using the spaces as study areas – though again unlike in Singapore libraries, the students there were largely not in large groups and looked like they were actually studying/working on assignments.

There is also a small children’s reading and art/craft area too where Hannah and Peter probably made a few new friends.:)

The initial itinerary after this point was to make our way to Chinatown for a look/see and a possible early dinner, but Peter was dozing in his stroller at his point – so it was back to the hotel, stopping by Melbourne Central to pick up some pastries for dinner.