10/04/04:

Melbourne: Day 1

Monday morning we took a maxitaxi (an Australian minibus-as-taxi) into Melbourne, along with most of the Iron Talons. As it turned out, Marty, Andrew, and Adam were staying in town for a few more days, just a few blocks away from us!

Our hotel, the Somerset Gordon Place, turned out to be an amazingly lucky find. Our room was actually a suite, with a bathroom, living room, bedroom, and full kitchen. And due to Ellen’s bargain-sniffing, the price of the room was only slightly more than that of the one-room motor lodge we’d stayed in for the convention!

The one strange feature of the room was the low door handles. While the doors themselves were normal size, the doorknobs were about two and a half feet off the ground. Apparently it was designed for halflings!

Beyond the spacious accommodations, Somerset Gordon Place is a beautiful place. It’s a historic building that once served as a shelter for indigent men. It has an indoor courtyard with a massive palm tree, and a greenhouse-style glass ceiling provides shelter from the weather while still letting in the light. It’s located a block up from Chinatown, and we had a great deal of excellent Chinese food over the course of the trip!

Our guidebook recommended a restaurant called The Flower Drum, and we thought we’d try this for dinner. In the process we discovered one of the interesting features of Melbourne: Alleys. Central Melbourne squeezes a lot of commerce into a small space, and almost every alley contains a few shops, if not a complete mall. It was often quite disorienting to glance down a dingy alley and discover an entire shopping center. Here’s one example we found when searching for a supermarket: this area is completely invisible from the sidewalk, but as you venture down the lane you discover a massive multi-level mall hidden just feet from the main road. It somehow made me feel like I was in post-apocalyptic world, where the survivors were trying to hide their centers of commerce from marauders.

The Flower Drum turned out to be in such an alley, across from the charmingly phallic Ding Dong Lounge (we did not venture inside to see what sort of entertainment the Ding Dong had to offer). Looks like one of the finest establishments in Melbourne, doesn’t it?

            Well, the inside was another story. There was a two-week waiting list for dinner. In addition, they had a dress code: shoes had to cover the entire foot, and shirts had to have collars. Wrong shoes, wrong shirt, no service. I’d only brought t-shirts and Chaco sandals, so after we managed to secure a lunch reservation for Friday, our course for the next day was clear: find cheap shoes and a shirt!   

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