Melbourne: NY Times Top Tips, Ideas?

[TLCOhio]

From the New York Times Travel Section coming this weekend, they will have this headline: “36 HOURS Melbourne” with these highlights: “Melbourne, long seen as Australia’s second city, is runner-up no more after officially edging past Sydney in population for the first time in more than a century. But if Sydney is the extroverted showboat full of grand gestures (opera house! beaches!), arts- and food-loving Melbourne plays it cool. Visitors will discover odd and wonderful surprises, sometimes hidden in the laneways (what Aussies call alleys), including spaces like a church caretaker’s cottage turned cocktail bar or a limestone art gallery tucked amid rustling gum trees.”

 

This detailed profile features a number of restaurants and bars, attractions, museums and live music, shopping, where to stay and getting around options and potentials.  

 

Here some added details that hit me as interesting background:  "Melbourne’s city center was a ghost town at night, until a relaxation of liquor licensing in the 1990s brought new life to the laneways.  Flinders Lane was the center of Melbourne’s rag trade, as its textile industry was known, until production moved offshore starting in the 1960s. Today, it’s home to a number of gorgeous shops and restaurants.  On weekends, Chinatown’s sidewalks are a crawl of families out for yum cha (what Australians call dim sum, from the Cantonese for “drink tea”). Melbourne’s Chinatown is the Southern Hemisphere’s oldest, established in the 1850s during the Victorian gold rush, when tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants came seeking their fortune.  Lygon Street, in Carlton, is Melbourne’s original Little Italy, where postwar migrants installed some of the city’s first espresso machines and imported Italian goods."

 

Reactions, corrections, likes and dislikes about this reporting by Tacey Rychter, an editor for NY Times’s Travel section who lived in Melbourne for nearly 30 years and travels there regularly.

 

Full story at:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/30/travel/things-to-do-melbourne-australia.html

 

THANKS!  Enjoy!  Terry in Ohio   

 

Sydney to NZ/Auckland Adventure, live/blog 2014 sampling/details with many exciting visuals and key highlights.  On page 23, post #571, see a complete index for all of the pictures, postings.  Now at 246,637 views.

https://boards.cruisecritic.com/topic/1896175-solstice-live-australianzhawaii-many-pix’s-jan-20-feb-3/