Melbourne Day 7: Victoria Market

The life of a city is usually found in the markets. That's where you can see the real stuff & the real people. In the city, everyone's fake... Just kidding-lah.

That's why when you're in Kuching, you'd have to drop by the Sunday Market at Satok. And similarly, when you're down in Melbourne, you'd have to go to Victoria Market.

Even if you're not buying stuff like me (Nee does all the shopping, I do all the carrying) it's still an interesting place to visit. In the vegie section of the market, you'd usually be able to see yelling Italians. Unfortunately I didn't have a picture of that cos I didn't see them there that morning.
And in the other seafood/butcher section of the market, an Asian guy was also yelling in deep undiscernible Australian accent, something about the meat going cheap & prices coming down. I hesitated to take a photo of him cos judging from the strength of his coarse voice, I didn't want to play the fool.




Roger mentioned something before about female pork tasting better. I think he's right cos they do make a point to differentiate between the sexes.


This is where I got my new supply of honey, something that I don't think I can live without. I can't survive a bout of diarrhea without it.


Nope. Didn't try that, but thought of it - not the rabbit, but the kangaroo meat. I thought it'd be like eating a national symbol. Like eating the Hornbill or Orang Utan in Sarawak. Or eating the kiwi bird in NZ, or eating the Bald Eagle in the US.


Oh, look! Malaysian satay in the most unexpected place. I saw the sign but I didn't see the satay that I expected.

I really didn't expected this. I guess Australia has been pretty strong in its trade protection. It looks like American products from the 1950s just made it into the market now.

Day 6: Oritai in South Yarra

Oritai is a Japanese Fusion restaurant owned by a Japanese Chef who considers his cooking as works of fine art.

So naturally, we expected to find fineness and the attention to details here in our food. Located in South Yarra, Jackson St, this place is all that we expected and more. It's little more on the classy side and has the food to match, as well as the price.

The was the Duck with miso sauce platter.

Rib eye steak with terrayaki sauce.

Japanese fried rice with veg

We ordered the sashimi platter which came as this huge serving of various entre goodies, all of them beautifully done. As we gobbled them down, we slowly came to the realisation that this might be too good to be true. All this for just AUD32??!!

And the truth was revealed when the bill came. It was AUD59 instead. Apparently the waiter took the wrong order and gave us a platter of everything instead. I remember my mom always say that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Hai...

Expensive Sashimi

And unlike other Aussie restaurants which would just charge you the original AUD 32, the Japanese lady supervisor insisted on us paying AUD 59 and she did that when we were filling in the feedback form. That's some good business sense there woman.

Expensive prawn roll

This place was turning out to be excellent in the beginning, but it ended up average instead. Our evening did not end in such a high note, but it was a pretty good meal after all.

Expensive Beef

Melbourne Day 6: A Day at Mt Danedong

Here are a few selected pictures which I took at Mt Danedong. As always, the highlights of my holiday trips are usually the scenic places, away from the hustle & bustle of the city. Maybe deep down inside I'm just a hilly-billy Tarzan boy.

Daisies have always been my favourite flowers. I admire them for their simplicity. Despite their minisculity, they hold a timeless classic beauty. It's one of those wild flowers that are tenacious as they can breed, I mean pollinate, & survive anywhere, quickly. And they don't cost RM20 a piece on Valentine's. Roses are evil.

I don't know what these are but they remind me of two unrelated things; ice-cream & the microphone in the recording studio.


This was what you can see almost everywhere in Melbourne now. It's full of little patches of yellow leaves. Autmn is coming & it's looking beautiful.

This quaint little tea shop was just next to Miss Marple's. Even before we could finish reading the sign board, Nee was already in there.

I took a peep inside & it was full of tea leaves & women. You'd think that coming up to a place like this would bring some appreciation of peace & nature, but these women were just shopping in the mountains.

After lunch, we drove on up to a scenic place (I can't remember the name, Roger help!). Most of the photos are already up in our previous post. As Nee & Roger spent quality brother-sisterhood time together, I played with my not-so-new camera.

Melbourne Day 6: Tea at Miss Marple's

Whenever we are in Melbourne, we try to spend a day at least outside Melbourne. This round we decided to go to the mountains. Don't get us wrong, we're not into the business of hiking and rock climbing. We are after all two lazy bums from Kuching who cannot survive without civilised toilet s & modern transportation. (Greg: that was Nee speaking for herself)

Mt Danedong is something like 45 min to 1 hour drive from Melbourne City via Springvale Road and Burwood Highway. It was a nice & cool day but then Roger had to do the curvy winding road up to a little town called Sassafras & that made me woozy, & I was sitting at the front okay.

We'd like to think that everybody else who came up to Mt Danedong would be heading to Miss Marple's Tea Room, just cos we were.

Being not familiar with Agatha Christie's books, it took us a while to figure out who Miss Marple was.Miss Marple was a cosy little place that seemed to be packed almost all the time.

You can't make reservations by the way, so the best was just to try our luck & we had some that day. There was a table for the 3 of us, but the 2s, 4s and others had to wait for like one hour even though they got there first.

Greg, who doesn't find British food appealing, thought that this was his best meal in Melbourne. So I'm still trying to figure him out. Maybe British food cooked in the Aussie way, he likes? Does that even make sense?!

Anyway, it was a typical British heartwarming meal. The hot piping pumpkin soup.

Warm cottage pies with cotton soft mash.

The chicken asparagus fingers just made our day.

We ordered a huge sundae to share but it wasn't much to shout about. We just saw someone having it & thought that it looked good.

and finally Ms Marples famous devonshire scones.

Ehmmm.....it is nice on its own - soft, warm, huge & yummy served with raspberry jam and whipped cream.

I really thought scones were supposed to be the denser kind of soft like the ones we had at Fortnum & Mason. But these ones were really cakey, a bit too cakey for our liking. For some reason they used whipped dairy cream instead of clotted ones. So if we were to compare London's scones, those were heaven and these were just plain earth.

But still, on the overall, i am still salivating looking back at the photos now.