Middle of the Week

So this week has been so eventful, busy and fun that I haven't had a moment to catch up with my blogging. However, I'm not sitting at an airport in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do until my flight boards in half an hour, and free internet. So an excellent opportunity to fill you in on the happity-hap.

If you'll recall, last Tuesday in Melbourne was a bit miserable for Kate and myself, as we were pretty hungover from our epic welcome drinks. On Wednesday morning though, we were both fresh again and ready to head into work at Monash.

That day I moved into the visitor office there, to give all of us a bit more space and so I can listen to my ridiculous music. The desk was huge and I got a lot of work done once I had my stuff spread everywhere in its usual haphazard way. The exciting part of the morning came when we went for lunch though. Monash is a massive campus and we had to walk through it to get to the Student's Union type area. Although this place is less of a student's union and more of a shopping mall filled with a massive food court, bar, shops and everything you could possibly imagine a student desires.

B&K took me to their favourite sushi bar, where they picked up their normal order of salmon and tuna sushi. This was very tempting, but I realised they were serving Thai food, and there's nothing I like better than a good Thai soup. So I picked up something called Tom 'blah blah' chicken noodle soup (Can't remember or find on google the name of this thing). It was huge, and worth every penny because it was a mix of everything I like: verging on healthy, spicy, noodle and chicken filled. I was extremely happy with this, and to top it all off, I picked up some White Chocolate Tim Tams for dessert :D

So I guess we eventually got back to work, and stayed there until around 4.30pm. Brad had to go pick Tilda up and take her to basketball, so he dropped me and Kate at the shopping district (Oakleigh) close to their house. I was going to show Kate how to cook a Maltese baked rice that night so we needed to pick up some ingredients. That included some awesome tree bread from the bakery, a new dish from the pound shop to cook the rice in, some wine from the liquor store (they don't sell it in supermarkets here) and obviously the main ingredients. We bought these from the supermarket, which amuses me because it's called Woolworths, a shop that no longer exists in the UK.

Traditional Baked Rice

After all this, we walked home to do some cooking and relaxing. The baked rice (or ross fil-forn as we call it in Malta) came super tasty - even Tilda ate most of it apart from the veggies. We wanted a mostly quiet night, so after Tilda went to bed we had a bottle of wine (or two) and settled down for the night.

The next day I was super busy with work things for my paper, so the work day went by super quickly. Again we went for lunch at the Union area, although this time my lunch wasn't quite so exotic (pizza and chips). We stayed quite late at work that day because we were planning to go into the city in the evening, and it didn't make sense to go home in between.

Wine, all beautifully presented

Shelves upon shelves of amazing wine

So that evening Brad drove us into the city centre, to a bar called Enoteca, on Gertrude Street. There are many places called Enoteca in Melbourne - we later discovered this is because it literally translates to Wine Repository. And that's exactly what this place was. An extremely stylish bar, with a hint of both modern and classical, with shelves and storage of every sort of wine you could imagine. We settled down at a wooden round table at the back of the bar - luckily we found place because we got there relatively early. The somalier comes over and you ask him for a recommendation based on previous things you've tried. 

First Riesling of the night

That's how we ended up drinking three different bottles of white that night. If I recall correctly, they were all Rieslings, although Kate swore the second tasted like a Chardonnay because of the extremely oaky flavour of the wine. But they were all lovely, completely worth the $50 a bottle we paid.

Yummy meat platter, dressed with some odd sort of chilli

Chris Flynn and Maria Lugaro met up with us there to enjoy the wine and company, and then the meat and cheese platters we ordered, which were excellent. They had a great selection of salamis and parma ham, and I loved all the cheeses we ordered, except perhaps the gorgonzola which I'm not partial to. But they all had beautiful flavours.

So that's how I spent the Thursday night in Melbourne. Hopefully I'll have time today to update with another blog about the wine tastings we went to on Friday, and our day out on Saturday culminating in an excellent dinner at a Louisiana Soul Food Bar and a pre-flight surprise.