Australia & NZ 2011 (15 March)

On our last morning in Melbourne we decided to get up early enough to have proper breakfast. Luckily, the other guys in my room left before me so I managed to do a bit of exercise before meeting Paola. It didn’t matter that we slept only 3 or 4 hours, we had a really good meal in a cafe a few metres away from the hostel.

Galleon Cafe is located on Carlisle Street, a few meters away from the beach. With funky vintage furniture and a great hippie vibe, it’s very popular among locals and backpackers.

Service is great, you can tell that they really care about their customers.

Having slept very few hours I really needed a coffee but the minute I read LSD in the beverages list I knew I had to try it. Latte Soy Dandelion (just in case you were wondering) was slightly sweet and very mild, a nice drink but I still needed coffee.

LSD, Latte Soy Dandelion ($3.70)

A short macchiato delivered the necessary caffeine hit. Nice flavour, a bit too much frothy for my taste. Paola had a latte and declared it a good one.

Short Macchiato ($3.20)

Latte ($3.20)

Because I hadn’t had eggs for breakfast for a while, my choice was the truffled eggs with goats cheese and wilted spinach on pide toast. They were as good as they sounded. Of course for the price I wasn’t expecting shavings of black truffles all over the eggs, but rather a bit of truffly taste from infused oil. A bit of thinly sliced mushrooms gave the dish more earthiness and the salty and tangy goats cheese complimented the taste of the wilted spinach wonderfully. The pide toast was the only unhealthy item in the dish but I couldn’t help it and finish it all.

Truffled Eggs served with goats cheese and wilted spinach on pide toast ($13.50)

Paola had a fruit salad with yogurt that looked really good. The thick yogurt with passion fruit made it especially attractive.

Fruit salad and yogurt

I was glad we had such a big and tasty breakfast because the next flight we caught was in Virgin Blue. Meaning: no food included.

We had a couple of hours to go home, take a shower and eat a snack (fruit and nuts) before heading to Campbell Cove, in the Sydney Harbour. We hired a boat for a harbour cruise with the whole bunch of Australians and international travelers. Our teacher gave a short talk, there were drinks on board, and we had not one but two rainbows by the end of the cruise. What else could we have asked for?

Dinner that night was at The Glenmore Hotel. We booked most of the tables of the rooftop and paid for the fixed-price BBQ, which included bread rolls, butter, salads (coleslaw, potato, Greek, rocket), lamb & rosemary sausages, beef steaks and onions, vegetarian skewers, and chicken. Pretty basic stuff but great for our hungry traveling gang.

Salads

Lamb & rosemary sausages

Steaks and onions

Vegetarian skewers, chicken

Galleon Cafe
9 Carlisle Street
St Kilda VIC 3182
(03) 9534 8934

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Glenmore Hotel
96 Cumberland Street
The Rocks NSW 2000
(02) 9247 4794

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Australia & NZ 2011 (14 March)

After the bad experience with the free dinner the night before (honestly, the worst meal I’ve ever had) you would expect me not to dare trying the free breakfast, right? Wrong. As I food blogger I felt responsible for giving breakfast a shot and writing about it. Plus, it was free.

Because all things available in the buffet table came out of some kind of container, there was no way of getting it wrong. Of course choices were not the healthiest ever but there was virtually no risk of food intoxication. There were a couple of kinds of industrial bread, spreads (butter, jam, honey, Vegemite, peanut butter), different kinds of cereal, milk, yogurt, coffee and infusions.

Having grown up eating cereal (when I knew nothing about its lack of nutritional value), I sometimes remember and miss its taste, so I decided to have a couple of bowls to satisfy my craving for another fifteen years or so. I first had a bowl of Kellog’s Just Right, which had a mix of cereals and dried fruit, with milk, and then a bowl of plain old corn flakes, which tasted exactly as I remembered them, also with milk. Then I had a bit of yogurt with honey for extra protein and a cup of awful coffee.

Breakfast

A bunch of us went for a walk along St Kilda’s beach, which BTW is beautiful.

St Kilda beach

The idea was to walk through the Botanical Gardens but by the time we arrived we were already hungry. We caught a tram to the city where we were meeting Paola’s sister in law, who lives in Melbourne. Unfortunately, the road was closed because of a parade and we had to get off the tram and walk.

We met with Kelly close to Federation Square. I asked about the Food & Wine Festival that was taking place in Melbourne, but she didn’t have much information and the only thing going on where we were was a garden thing. There were pumpkins and composting transparent things but no food stalls at all.

Pumpkins at the Metlink Edible Garden

Kelly suggested going to Chinatown but we thought a cafe would give us a better chance of tasting the delights Melbourne has to offer. She then suggested Time Out cafe, right in Fed Square. After a short wait we got a table and some of us ordered drinks. A cappuccino, a freshly squeezed orange juice and a “berry nice” were set on our table.

Berry Nice ($7.90)
Muddled blueberries & strawberries topped w crushed ice, sparkling red orange & soda water

Then we ordered our meals; three of us had the calamari salad (all with extras: two with salmon and one with king prawn), Agnes had the chicken shnitzel ciabatta, Kelly the beef burger, and Andrey the chicken parmigiana. The prices were on the expensive side, I assume because of the location. Food was nice but nothing special, I guess I’ll need to go back to Melbourne for an exclusive food tour sometime in the future.

Calamari salad w fresh King Prawn ($22.90)
Tender calamari strips marinated in ginger, garlic & coriander, pan seared w mixed leaves, crispy shallots, watercress & fresh tomato tossed in an Asian dressing, plus fresh King Prawn

Calamari salad w grilled Atlantic salmon ($22.90)
Tender calamari strips marinated in ginger, garlic & coriander, pan seared w mixed leaves, crispy shallots, watercress & fresh tomato tossed in an Asian dressing, plus grilled Atlantic salmon

Chicken Parmigiana ($25.90)
Chicken schnitzel, ham, napoli & cheese served w fat chips & a side salad

Fed Beef Burger ($19.90)
House made beef burger w melted cheese, mushroom & red onion ragu, tomato relish, lettuce & fresh tomato, served w fat chips

Chicken Ciabatta ($14.90)
Chicken schnitzel, tomato, lettuce, Swiss cheese & pesto mayonnaise

After lunch we went to the Melbourne Museum. We didn’t have time to see all the exhibitions but managed to see some forest stuff and get through the Melbourne story.

Then we walked a few hundred meters to Fitzroy, a cool area with trendy cafes and shops. Kelly took us to Jasper Coffee. First thing you notice when you walk in is the amazing smell of the coffee beans in display. I took a photo of those but the guy told me not to, because the beans were copyrighted. WTF?? Well, at least I could shoot the other stuff: packaged coffee, chocolates, etc.

Jasper Coffee

Coffee

Crockery

Sweets

Chocolate

Crockery, etc

We sat outside in charming but not very comfortable benches that looked pretty much as the chairs in this pic.

Hot chocolate

Latte

Soy cappuccino

Iced coffee

We headed back to Fed Square, where the venue for that night’s talk was. Paola had to set up the book shop; Andrey, Lis and I went for a walk and a rest in the park before the talk.

That night the party was in the huge house where 10 of our friends live. I ate a lot of crap: chips, mini meat pies and sausage rolls from Party Packs, and also some cheese and almost a glass of red wine. I got to bed almost at 4 am, hoping to get a bit of sleep before our next flight.

Australia & NZ 2011 (13 March)

On our last day in Perth we had to wake up really early. There were few cars available to transport all of us to catch the next flight, and I had the bad luck of being in the first lot. We waited for a couple of hours until everybody else arrived. Naturally, I got hungry. I was about to buy an overpriced salad fruit and a coffee when I remembered I had teriyaki beef nuggets (same brand as the jerky) and a sachet of Vital Greens.

The flight to Melbourne was again in Qantas. It got a bit delayed (the luggage belt broke down) but that didn’t harm our schedule. We were served lunch; by the time the attendants hit my row there was no more chicken, only beef casserole. I didn’t mind it, as I eat virtually anything as long as it’s tasty. The beef was tender, the gravy was flavoursome, and it was served with potatoes, carrots, broccoli and mushrooms. There was also a bread roll, biscuits and butter on the tray, which I didn’t touch, but I did eat the thick slice of Tasty cheese as dessert. I also had water and a cup of coffee.

Lunch

We arrived at Melbourne around 6 pm. A bus took us to our hostel in St Kilda, The Base. The place was full of drunken kids. There was loud music coming out of the speakers of the bar in the ground floor. We were shown how the card keys worked and walked our way up to our rooms via the staircase with carpets that I suspect haven’t been vacuumed since the hostel opened (the lift was out of order).

I was assigned a 4-bed room with 3 people I didn’t know. Two of them were girls that I haven’t seen awake yet, they’ve been lying on their beds making occasional noises (sleeping noises, not farting).

Guests at The Base are entitled to free breakfast and dinner. We didn’t have much time before we had to leave, so we just had dinner there. A guy behind a hot display served us what looked like a cheap but decent fried rice with chicken. Just looked like. I have had my share of bad meals during my lifetime but this was ridiculous. It tasted like leftovers of the leftovers. Apparently they had thrown some corn, plus overcooked peas and broccoli with week-old rice (felt undercooked but I think it was the unpleasant crunchiness that appears after a few days of sitting in the fridge). The pieces of chicken were the only half-decent ingredients in the “dish”. There were also a few pieces of a weird-tasting sausage. Seasoning was a bit of ginger, and I suppose a tiny bit of salt. I had to drown the thing in BBQ sauce (which I don’t really like) to make it more palatable.

Free dinner at The Base

After eating we were to the Buddhist centre for a Q&A session with our lama. Then we stayed there for drinks (again, none for me) as long as we could to avoid going back to the filthy hostel.