Melbourne, Australia - Travel with Bitsy

In today's episode , we are meeting with Itzy from Melbourne , australia , who made her way there via Germany , norway , the US and London . Fun fact , melbourne was originally named Batmania , although it has nothing to do with Bruce Wayne .

Instead , the name derives from one of the city's founding fathers , john Batman , who discovered central Melbourne and said this will be the place for a village . In this episode , we learn about the day-to-day life in Melbourne and talk about the native wildlife . Enjoy , hi B , native wildlife . Enjoy , hi Bitsy . Hi , nice to meet you , you too .

Yeah , welcome from down under right , yeah , right now , I'm assuming Yep , that's correct Nine , nine , nine in the morning , so it's , oh my god , oh , thursday afternoon for you guys . Yeah , yeah , how's Friday ? Looking for us a preview . Well , here it's humid and a bit hot . So , yeah , probably a bit different from Colorado .

And and I'm in California , you're in California , okay , yeah , yeah , oh , fabulous , so where ? What's the weather like around ? Well , look , height of summer , so normally very , very hot . Yes , melbourne's , melbourne's quite good because it doesn't normally get the humidity that you get in , you know , the further North you go .

So I , I I'm not great with heat , which is hilarious that I live in Australia , but I'm okay here because it isn't usually too humid , but it is a little bit today we're we're going to get some thunderstorms later , so , okay , just in time for the tennis .

Oh nice , oh fantastic , would you say that it's kind of like New York then a little bit , where , like you , get pretty good winters . When winter's there , I mean , do you call what you call June and July winter then ? Or do you call , yeah , absolutely , yep , yep . So yeah , it's bizarre , isn't it ? So ?

Christmas in December , so it's okay in the middle of summer , I would say so , latitude wise , it's about the same as in Virginia , near where Glenn and I went to university . Oh , but it's so we get . One of the expressions about Melbourne is that you get four seasons in a day , so we get all the weather .

We get proper spring , we get proper summer , we get actual winter . It doesn't snow , but we get if it gets to , if it gets to the equivalent of 32 degrees . That's cold . Like you know , it rarely drops below zero for us . How long have you been there now ? Well , this will be . This is my 25th year . Yeah , I moved here in October of 97 .

Okay , and did you come straight from Virginia or somewhere on the East Coast then ? No , no , no , I was actually . You want the long version or the short version ? Yeah , whatever version . It's open to whatever you want to discuss . Yeah , I'm a little bit of a nomad , but my father was in the army , so we moved my whole life .

So I was born in Michigan , but then we moved to Germany for four years and then we came back to the States and then we went to Norway and four years , and then we came back to the States and then we went to Norway and I finished high school in Norway and my parents stayed in Oslo when I went back to the States to go to university .

And then I was in France for a year and then back in Norway for a little while and then I went to London . So I was living in London when I met my husband , who is Australian , and we were there for about five and a half years together . We knew , you know , we knew we wanted to have a family and London's a great place to live .

If you're young , dual income , don't have to worry about things like school . And a lot of our friends were moving out of London . You know starting families and moving out . So it was kind of we made the decision that you know , lifestyle wise , australia was a much better place to have a family and and he'd been away for about eight years by then .

So he was ready to come home and for me it was just another move , so I was happy to come . Did it take adjusting to get into it or was it pretty comfortable right away ? Look , it was pretty comfortable right away . I was lucky because I kind of came into a fairly established network , because you know he had grown up here .

All of his friends from school were still here , you know so , and I walked straight into . You know it wasn't like having to start over fresh somewhere , and Australia is really Melbourne in particular .

I really loved I had been here a couple of times on holiday , like once for his brother's wedding and once just for another friend's wedding and just to establish whether . You know , we came back to see whether I thought I could do this for good .

And yeah , it's Australia's second largest city , but we're only behind Sydney by about I think it's less than a million now . So you know it's it's populations over 5 million . So it's a big city but it's got all the conveniences of small towns .

So I like to describe it as kind of like London , in that it's like lots of little areas that all have their own individual character and feel and atmosphere , but they all kind of combine together to make one big city , combined together to make one big city .

And I see it's like located on the very south and it's almost like there's a lake and then the ocean , but it's probably just an inlet or something . Well , it's the bay . Yeah , that's the Port Phillip Bay . So , yeah , we're . So we're the Sydney's on a harbor , we're on a bay .

Yeah , I was just gonna say you know , we we don't have ocean beaches in Melbourne proper . All along the southern coast , both directions out , we've got the southern ocean , so we've got great , great ocean beaches , just not right in Melbourne proper . It looks amazing .

I was curious when you first moved in you know it's a little bit ago , but I was curious what were some of the things coming from ? And you were coming from the UK or from London yeah , already over there . But were there any like oh , wow , or you know different things that stood out ? And are they still the same ?

Because I know things have changed so much too .

I think I always described Australia as kind of like the perfect blend between the US and the UK . It's got the openness and friendliness of the United States and the service mentality of the US , but it's got a lot of you know the things that I liked about living in London . You know a lot of those were here as well .

It's a really , really multicultural country . It's got huge amounts of immigration from all over the world . I think the last census , I think one in three Australians either was born overseas themselves or has a parent that was born overseas .

So you know , people talk a lot about multiculturalism and things , but it's you know , it absolutely is kind of the backbone of what's made Australia so unique . I had no idea about that . Yeah , yeah , yeah . At the end of World War II , a lot of Italian and Greek migrants came At one point .

I mean , I don't know if I've got the stats anywhere to back it up , but at one point they used to say that Melbourne was the third largest Greek city in the world after Athens and Thessalonica , because we had a huge population of Greek people that came and now it's like second and third and fourth generation , but it's still really , really strong .

And you know we've got lots of cultural festivals every you know .

So we've got um Ligon Street in Carlton is like , with lots of Italian restaurants , because that's where a lot of the Italian have settled and made their homes , and um , and then further into the city , near areas , and um Oakley is an area near us that's got fabulous Greek community with great butchers and great bakeries and fruit mongers and yeah , so you can

get any kind of food you want . Well , yeah , pretty much . And Vietnamese too . You have a really large Vietnamese community because at the end of the Vietnam War a lot of migrants came . Yeah , and I was looking at something about the religion , because sometimes I always like to ask that religion , but let me just do a little research .

You know ahead of time , and it was saying that it's it's really broken up , so it's still like 14% Christian , but they send non-Christians you have . Islam is very popular 600,000 . And I think this is all of Australia . Buddhism almost 600,000 . Hinduism over 400 . I think it's called Sikhism , s-i-k-h-i-s-m , and Judaism , 90,000 .

So probably from all this immigration that you were talking about Immigration , absolutely yeah . So the Hinduism and Sikhism , that is probably . We've got a very large Indian population that has that and that actually that's probably one of the big changes .

When you asked about the changes , when I first got here , I was working at a university when I first not immediately , but the number of international students that we had from India was quite low . It was very much more Chinese , hong Kong , malaysian and Vietnamese . But now it's flipped .

India's become like a huge source of immigration and international students and things . So there's a again . That's a big shift and that's probably why that reflects so heavily in the statistics about the religions . So how easy it is .

Because I thought I remember either watching like a HGTV show or something about people wanting to move to Australia , or maybe my friends , they spend a lot of time way down up in the north but they said you can't just move there unless some requirement either you have to be able to buy a house or show that you have X amount of money .

And so they said but if you're under 30 or something like her daughter , you could just move there . Are they pretty like do you know what the requirements are for our listeners to like ? If you say , hey , I want to move to Australia , like , what does it take to be able to be a good candidate ?

So with the , with her daughter , for example , I believe , it's still two years that you can get . If you're under 30 , you could get like a traveler's visa . So a lot of backpacker culture is huge here and that's one of the things that we're really suffering from with COVID .

Isolation is that we have lost masses of backpackers that do a lot of agricultural work and hospitality work and so places , especially up north , up in Queensland , and the fruit farms and things are desperate because they just don't have the normal source of employees . So you can come for two years .

It used to be a requirement that if you did three months of agricultural work you could get an extension for an extra year . So that's why a lot of people would go and do work , work the vineyards work , fruit farms work some agricultural things . So they've got an extra year to stay and I believe that they've gotten rid of that .

But as an adult , as a moving here permanently , there are a couple of options . You can be sponsored . So if you are a critical , what your job is considered a critical skill that we are acquiring , then you can get sponsored to come in on a I think it's called a 480 visa .

Or if you work with a company that needs you here , they can sponsor you to come in . Or there is the . So if you buy a business which will then employ a certain number of local hires , then that is a way to kind of fast track residency .

What about , like a digital nomad who has their own business and can travel all over the world and wants to stay like there for like six months ? Is that a typical visa ? You can kind of yeah , I think six months is a tourist , but I don't know if that would allow you to work . But if you're only working for yourself , that's a very good question .

I know that . You know , obviously tourist visas don't allow you to work , to be employed in Australia , but if you were working for yourself , I don't see how that would be a problem . Yeah , like for my example , I can get somebody in a lot of trouble . Yeah , look into that a little further .

I guess , like for me , I do placement , fundraising and some other things , but it's all here in the U ? S so it , you know . But all I need is a computer and a phone and I can do it anywhere and I know that's an interest of all of ours . And I thought there was like a standard like six months or so is typical , but I can be totally wrong on that .

I'm pretty sure it's six months as a tourist and you can come and go . So you know , people go to New Zealand for a couple of days and then come back and then that extends your visa by another six months . So if you've got the means and the ability to support yourself , then I think you could probably jump around and go to Bali .

Yeah , exactly , is Bali close to you guys ? Yeah , bali is very close . Bali is from Melbourne . I think it's a five hour flight , so from the top end , from up Darwin , and I think it's only about two hours from Darwin . It's our closest neighbor , like your Caribbean .

Yeah , yeah , absolutely , that's where you know , not a great image , but a lot of young Australians that end up going to Bali on cheap holiday . You know , cheap package holidays and well used to , right , yeah , it sounds incredible . So what do you do there ? I've had a series of jobs rather than a straight career , I guess you'd say .

At the moment I'm working with a friend who's got a training business so we deliver responsible service of alcohol , safe food handling , training in secondary schools mainly . I worked with this same friend many years back in the wine industry .

So , oh fun , you know , wine's got to be kind of that's kind of a natural progression , that yeah , oh yeah , huge , huge , huge , huge . We've got yeah , I'm a little biased , but we've got some of the best in the world .

So , okay , I know I live right next to Napa , so I guess , okay , I'm open , and my brother-in-law is French and he says his French wine is the best too . It works , so it's great . Are there industries that are strong , there , positions that are big that companies are looking for , or anything in that area ?

I think the last couple of years have made everybody realize that we are a little bit more creative and adaptable than perhaps companies gave us credit for . Melbourne unfortunately has the record for being the longest lockdown city in the world . We had six lockdowns . I can't remember the exact number of days , but it was over 180 .

It was a lot , but people really , you know , worked really well working from home and it just showed that you know it is possible and people still .

I have to say I was very , was very lucky . My children are older , so I didn't have to deal with to me the the thought of having to try and work plus keep up a home plus try and make sure that my kids schooling wasn't as disrupted as it could have been . I take my hat off to the people that had to do that .

But yeah , like I said , mine are a bit older so they were a little bit more self-sufficient . But creativity is a huge thing .

I mean , you know digital creatives and technology and you wouldn't know it by our kind of reputation worldwide with climate change records but there's a real push for a lot of green technology and green industries and even things like one of our biggest mining companies is a company called BHP and they're looking at green hydrogen and about capturing that as a power

source . So there's , yeah , I think innovation is a huge plus . If you've got creativity and ideas about innovation , that's a big feather in your cap to be able to pull that through . Right , okay , once you've thought of that , it's not my stereotype like stereotype of australia . It's cool , yeah , because we're laid-back surfers and right , exactly right .

Yeah , something lower key . Yeah , so the melbourne , uh , sydney are pretty big hubs for business , I'm assuming as well , just because those are two of the big , biggest cities . I see Adelaide I don't know if that's how big I think Adelaide's probably about fourth biggest now . Brisbane would be the next biggest . Here you go .

I can't tell you if Perth or Adelaide is bigger . Perth , over at WA , is it's the most remote capital city in the world , but it's also kind of the hub for a lot of the mining industry . So that's why Perth is or WA . Western Australia is very wealthy . I didn't realize there was anything going on over there . So Perth is pretty populated .

It's a couple of million . Yeah , it's a big city . It's just far away . It's five hours or four and a half hours from Melbourne on a plane , so it's Okay .

And where were all those fires last year , beginning , I remember , beginning of 2020 , that's , my daughter was talking about raising money and then like , yeah , funnily enough , that was actually that was in Victoria and New South Wales all along . So the Southeast coast of Victoria , kind of .

And then coming up through , uh , into new south wales , they were , you know , devastating , devastating . There was a community that I don't know if you saw any of the images , but there's one , just haunting one , where it's a small tinny , a small like outboat outboard mortar boat going away from the coast and the sky's just red .

I suppose in california you're probably used to those . I'm in in Colorado because you just had some devastating ones in Colorado as well . Yes , three different locations all being hit by fire . It's kind of impactful . Wow , right , yes , let's , yeah , yeah , that doesn't happen very often .

I'm looking at the map and I see Western Australia , south Australia , queensland , new South Wales , australian Capital Territory . I don't see the top . My guess is that's probably North Australia . Oh , yeah , northern Territory just popped up . Yeah , northern Territory , that's where Darwin is . Yep , got it . And how do they decipher those ?

Are they all like states or are they just no , no , no , no . We're a federation , so we've got states and territories . So the ACT is where Canberra is , which is the actual capital , kind of like Washington DC .

They carved out a space and made it neutral so that at that point Melbourne and Sydney were the two largest cities and Melbourne was where the first parliament was held . And then they built Canberra , the head of the government being there and a lot of the you know any of the like the Mint and the National Science Museum and all those kinds of things . It's .

Yeah , I quite like Canberra . It's a bit small for a lot of people and if you don't work in government , the complaint is that there's not a lot outside of the federal government . But yeah , so we're all independent states . So you said canberra , that's the one that's . Canberra looks like it's up and b-e-r-r-a yep , that's it .

Okay , up towards the kind of almost between you and sydney , except it's close , exactly . Yeah , so they carved out a little bit of territory out of new squales . And have you been way up north like Darwin ? Are those areas populated ? It looks like that would be a nice , really hot area , very tropical , I would assume , super tropical .

I haven't been to Darwin , much to my horror . I've been up far north Queensland .

There's a city called Cairns , c-a-i-r-n-s , and then from there further up towards Port Douglas and the Great Barrier Reef and all the way up to Cape Tribulation , which is heading towards the northernmost point of the very tip , and so that's , you know , tropical rainforests , yeah , the reef , which is amazing If you get a nice clear day .

It's just , it's magnificent . I think I did a little bit of research .

I listened to a couple of your podcasts earlier , and your friend that was talking about snorkeling in the red sea and yeah , there's amazing snorkeling and the reef there is just it's fantastic , as you know , and hopefully it stays that way because it's I'm in danger of being bleached by climate change and right , yeah , and then I remember our friends .

They , they would go to this place called new style , like the yogurt n-o-o-s-a that's . Is that in Queensland as well ? Then that is in Queensland . That's much further south . So that's , yeah , that's kind of that's just a little bit north of Brisbane . So you know , when you say much further south , queensland's very long , like the coast is . It's a big state .

I'm trying to think it's about an hour and a half , two hours north of Brisbane . Okay , so have you traveled a lot or are you just like here are these places ? Or have you done a lot of exploration throughout the country ? Yeah , places , I haven't been . I haven't been to the Red Center . I'd really like to get to Uluru .

That is , as you know , when we were growing up , it would have been known as Ayers Rock , the big red rock in the middle of the country . Oh , okay , yeah , I haven't been . My parents had been one time when they came , but I haven't made it yet . I haven't been to Darwin , I've been to Perth , I've been to the far north Queensland .

We lived in Adelaide for a year with my husband's job , which was a lot of fun . Yeah , I really liked Adelaide . Adelaide's also big in the wine industry because the Barossa Valley and the Clare Valley the great thing about it it is you're an hour away from you know world-class vineyards .

So so if you like wine , australia is a great place for wine travel because you've got over in wa , you've got margaret river , you've got the barossa and the claire in south australia . Here in melbourne we're an hour from the yarrow valley , plus also down the mornington peninsula and it's quite tourist focused , like they've made it really accessible .

You can get there and they can do . You can do tastings and tours and things and they , you know , to help educate and explain wine . And how do you get around the country ? So say you want to go to Melbourne and Adelaide and then go up to Noosa . Do you have high-speed trains or does everyone rent cars or you have to just fly because it's way too far ?

No high-speed trains , unfortunately . That's something they've been kind of debating for . Well , it's been on the cards as long as I've lived here .

They're building a high-speed train between Melbourne and Sydney , kind of via Canberra , which would be fantastic because the Melbourne Sydney air corridor is the busiest air corridor in the world because it's about a nine-hour drive , ten-hour drive , but well , I know with Qantas it used to be , there was a flight every half hour between Sydney and Melbourne .

There's an , an expression that gets used like called the tyranny of distance , and that was about Australia being so far away and how that has shaped history and economic policy and things because of being so remote . But it's also kind of applicable within the country because it's big . It's just it's like the U S , you know , landmass wise .

I was just wondering how , what the size compared to the U S is it ? I think it's . I think it's almost the same . It's almost the same as the continental U S . Yeah , so , considering we have 50 States and you have like five or or I don't know if they're five , but yeah , we've got seven plus two territories , or no ? Oops , let me get that back .

Everybody forgets about Tasmania , which is a shame , because Tasmania is absolutely stunning Really . It is such a beautiful place . Yeah , it is gorgeous , if you are kind of into outdoorsy activities , it's got incredible mountain biking , it's got hiking , some of the most remote hiking you will do , and it is just breathtakingly beautiful .

Look up a place called um wine glass bay in the fresne national park f-r-e-y-c-i-n-e-t , but wine glass bay is probably , if you get some google images that'll come up and it's just beautiful . It's . It is beautiful . Wow , there's some pictures of it with the different colors too , some greens and aquas . And what's the best time of year to go there ?

Um , I think autumn and spring are the two best times to come to australia , I think , you know , I think march , april or october , november , before it gets , you know , to extremes .

I mean , if you come in the summertime , as in northern summer , you know , july , august then if you go up to our far north , that's the best time for there because it's not as hot and a lot of people escape up north during the winter . You know they go to New South Port Douglas or Cairns or Palm Cove , you know , to get out of the cold .

Port Douglas sounds familiar , I've heard Port Douglas . Is that Tasmania or Australia ? Port Douglas sounds familiar . I've heard Port Douglas . Is that Tasmania or Australia ? No , no , that's yeah , port Douglas is in Queensland , it's , that's about . It's about an hour and a half drive from Cairns , so you fly into Cairns and then there's a .

You know , there's Mission Beach , there's Port Douglas . Port Douglas is one of the main areas where you can leave to the reef cruises , so it's it's quite a big .

But what I always liked about it is that it , even though it's a very touristy town it used to be it was a great blend , like there's lots of high-end resorts but there are also lots of backpackers , so it made it a really vibrant . It wasn't just like a five-star town , it was . You know , you had cane toad racing in the pub .

This is a Queensland you're talking about . Yep , that's in Port Douglas . Okay , got it . And I'm looking at also Tasmania and I see snow . Is there snow ? That happens there too ? Wow , yeah , cradle mountain , that's . That's cradle mountain national park . There's some great hiking in there .

There's something called the overland track , which is like a two or three day . I think you can do it for a little bit longer , but it's a well kind of known , kind of like the Appalachian Trail . It's a well-known marked trail that people can hike . And there's on the far southwest coast of Tasmania . It's like the most unexplored part of the world .

It's , you know , you genuinely feel like you are the only person on earth . And what was that called specifically ? Again , overland , that's just so . The Overland Trail . I think it's Okay , I think it's the Overland Trail in Cradle Mountain National Park . Yeah , okay , I'm going to highlight that . That sounds incredible . The Overland Track .

There you go , okay , it's , it's the Overland Track . That's what I wrote In Cradle Mountain . Lake St Clair yeah , okay , Lake St Clair . Oh , it looks gorgeous . Yeah , the pictures are amazing , it looks really beautiful . And how far is a flight ?

Well , I guess depending on where you are in Australia , but from Australia to Tasmania , so from us , from here in Melbourne , it's , it's a , you know , it's a like up and down . It's a 50 minute flight to . Yeah , you barely , you barely get altitude before you're you're descending again . But there's also a ferry . Um , a lot of people take the .

It's called the star of tesmania . It's an overnight ferry so you can take your car . So a lot of people . If you're going for a longer trip , we'll do that and we'll take the , the ferry from melbourne to devonport . Oh , okay , and that's so you kind of go to sleep . You've got your vehicle ? Yeah , yep , exactly , that's part of the federation , then .

Or new zealand , no , totally , um , totally separate , totally separate country . No , no , no , it's been . Yeah , it's been a consideration before . People have joked about unifying and making one country , but it's about three and a half hours away four hours away , depending on where you're leaving from . But a lot of it's an easy .

If you were coming this far , it would be a good thing to make it a combined trip . New Zealand's got I think you probably need somebody to give you a little bit more in-depth information about New Zealand but New Zealand's got a lot of parts because it's further south .

Oh yeah , I took a trip there in my 20s and we were there nine days and oh my gosh , we did like everything dangerous and like we didn't have to sign any insurance waivers , like , oh you hurt . You know that's your problem . You know the stuff we would do Fire beware . So let's talk a little bit about like cost of living in melbourne versus other places .

So say , melbourne , is that one of the more expensive places to live , or is that you get a lot of digital nomads , or do they all nomads all hang out in queensland in certain towns that are a little more affordable . Or ,

yeah , um , melbourne is very , uh , it cost of living is pretty high . Um , cost of living is pretty high across the country in general where my sons , my two sons , are working part-time jobs at a butcher's . They're 27 an hour , you know , which is just , you know , unheard for someone who waitressed their way through college .

Yeah , 27's , $27 an hour , that's just insane . But so that the trade-off is that , you know , everyone earns a living wage , but it means that costs are higher . What's that ? So what is typical like , if someone wanted to stay there , how much would it cost to rent a I don't know a house or an apartment , a flat , I don't know what they call them .

I would say that airbnb has become very popular here as well . You know , there's kind of flat sharing or you know , house sharing . Uh , websites , oh , I wouldn't , I wouldn't really know what I know for a hotel , really like , if you were getting a hotel room in the city , I think you'd be looking for , you know , a basic hotel room .

I don't think you could really in melbourne find one for less than probably $150 , $200 a night . And if you were staying just any real time , I think you would definitely end up getting either like a service department or renting a house or doing something like that , because staying in a hotel the whole time would get very expensive .

How much is housing prices there Like what would typical , I think , your neighborhood or around it ? What's cost of of just curious compared to , I know it's , it's , it's very expensive , it's crazy expensive and it just it can't be any worse than the Bay area . No , no , that's , that's actually . That's probably true .

We , the last time we were in the States , we , we , we flew via San Francisco on our way in and you know I'd been to , you know my husband and I had been to San Francisco a couple of times , or I'd been a couple of times and he'd been once before .

But the boys were very intrigued by , you know , they loved the idea of it being so , you know , so close to all of the tech over in the Valley . But it was gobsmacking . We always , you know , we kind of take a bit of a look in estate agents' windows and see what your money could buy anywhere else in the world .

Yeah , so what would be a city in Melbourne ? That's very expensive , oh , I think , I'm pretty sure . I'm pretty sure that our average house price is now I think it's tipped over 800,000 . Okay , okay , so that's pretty similar to the bay area . Yeah , that's , yeah . So in the suburb that I'm in it's , I think it's it's high . Yeah , it's a lot . It's scary .

That sounds like going to the grocery store . It's scary a lot . Yeah , it's a kind of pretty similar to the bay area as well . What's family like ? Uh with uh , you know things that . What do kids typically do ? I'm sure it's possibly electronics and similar to us , but are there any culture ?

You know traditions or things that families do or get together or certain foods that they like to eat or you know , share meals ? It's funny . A friend from school from William and Mary , texted me and sent me a message a few years back because they were having a multicultural day at their school and they were doing Australian food .

I was like well , make lamingtons , what's that Lamingtons ? Lamingtons are lamingtons . It's like a vanilla sponge in a square that's split in half and it's got a layer of jam in the middle but then they're rolled in chocolate and desiccated coconut . They're pretty yummy . We have fantastic seafood , being very .

Something like 75% of the population lives within six miles of the coast . It's all very heavily concentrated along the coasts , again , because of migration . We've got amazing ethnic any kind of ethnic food you would want . You can get barbecues , paul Hogan shrimp on the Barbie joke but we have a lot of bar .

We do a lot of barbecues with friends because it's a very outdoors focused culture . We do do a lot outside . Sport is huge . Melbourne is sports crazy . What are the big sports there ? Soccer , yeah , yeah , yeah , yep , that's , that's very , very popular . We have a sport called Australian rules football , which is for the uninitiated . It's pretty eyeopening .

My , my father and my brother used to call it no rules football because it just looks like a free for all . Oh , wow , it's different than rugby , though , yeah , yeah , different to rugby . Yeah , rugby is a lot more popular in New South Wales and Queensland . It's not . We have a rugby team here in Melbourne , but it's just not too rugby .

We have rugby league and rugby union . It's not as popular . Just Aussie rules has kind of got the grip and people are fanatical about it . You know , it's almost like their religion . You know , you're the team that you grow up supporting . You can't , you can't switch teams . You can't . Yeah , it's , it's fierce .

And baseball , um , yes , actually there are , people do play baseball . Um , a friend of mine's son played softball and baseball . Here it's it's not as popular . You can pretty much find any sport that you wanted to play . You know that . I know another friend's children played lacrosse , which again is a bit of a niche sport . Here it's not as thing .

My son was a very keen hockey player , which is unusual because field hockey in the US is strictly a girl's sport , but here it's in . Everywhere else in the Commonwealth it's a very popular sport for boys and girls . My younger son played soccer for a long time . What else ? Tennis , starting next week We've got one of the Grand Slams .

So you know the city loves sport and embraces sport and we'll bet on anything . We have synchronized swimming too . My daughter does synchronized swimming and the Olympic coaches coach her and she coached the Australian team . And my daughter this year she's a senior in high school is learning the Australian um , wow , olympic routine . They're actually yeah , yeah .

So swimming , swimming of any kind is very it's , you know it's , it's almost compulsory . You learn to swim . It used to be a compulsory thing at all . All state schools , all primary schools did swimming lessons . Because it's just , you have to learn to swim . It's pretty . A lot of pools , yeah , oh , absolutely , especially surfing .

I'm sure there's surfing things , yeah , all that , but no , it's interesting . The Olympic coach that was the trainer for the Australian team is our coach right now , or she's helping , helping with training her that that same routine that she created for the Australian Olympic team , which is kind of fun . So Lolly is really cool . Yeah , that's fantastic .

Yeah , so super fun , but really cool . So , in terms of the things that you would say are big highlights to visit , are there things that , uh , aren't really talked about ? We always like to kind of get the underground . Are there other areas and places to go or see ?

And even in melbourne , um , if someone were to come there , that are kind of hidden gems that you know , maybe aren't necessarily , you know , marketed . Yeah , um , I think in melbourne , in in Melbourne in particular , we've got a really , really strong bar and music scene , lots of local .

Again , this is all pre-COVID , you know , when we've been shut down for a number of years but lots of really cool hidden bars down laneways , rooftop bars you know , tiny little places that you know real word of mouthways , rooftop bars , you know , tiny little places that you know real word of mouth . And and restaurants .

You know , again , we've got a huge food culture . Food , food , booze , music . We've got the comedy festival . We've got the international comedy festival every year in april . That's that's coming up and that's always good fun . You can just go . You can go to the ticket office on it .

You know , obviously the headline acts you have to buy the tickets ahead of time , but it's a great way to go and

you just , you know they're in little little bars and clubs and things and you can just go and see up-and-coming comic , very , very reasonably priced too . You can go and just pick up a ticket on the night . Um , the penguins . Depending on the age of the people that come , especially if they've got kids , I always take them to the fairy people .

They're now called the little penguins . We're not allowed to call them fairy penguins anymore . They're um . They come in at philip island , which is about an hour and a half from melbourne , and they come in every night like in giant wave onto the shore . Actual penguins scramble to their burrows , actual penguins , actual penguins . Teeny , tiny , little penguins .

Like how tiny , six inches about . Yeah , yeah , yeah , they're not little penguins , yeah , so it's . It happens at at sundown , so if you go in wintertime it's a lot earlier in the day , but obviously in the summertime sun it's not to about nine o'clock at night .

So depending on like , if you've got little kids , they might not necessarily be able to stay awake that long . Is that only near Melbourne ? Then , yeah , there's a , there's a colony of them on . Come up on Phillip Island . If you look up Phillip Island colony a penguin colony or the penguin parade , they call it .

If you look up Phillip Island's colony , penguin colony or the penguin parade , they call it . So they've got these specially built bleachers in the dunes so that they're stacked up and away from the burrows and they just and they come .

It's really , it's really cute because you know one of them will come in on a wave and kind of tentatively come onto the shore and then they scramble back in the water and then a couple more and then all of a sudden there's this wave of penguins . Oh my gosh , it's adorable . It's adorable , it is really really cute .

And they've got and they've done it really really sensitively with the way they've built the walkways , because so they're raised , so they're away from the burrows and things so that the penguins aren't impacted . But you can get really close . You can see that it is really adorable .

I'm seeing the , the um , the uh raised part where everyone's sitting and it even has like a glass part where it's sort of almost under and then there , so you can see it almost eye view , and then little penguins are running by . Oh , that's adorable . So we yeah , they're very cute , do they ? Is it like just a time period ? Are they ?

Did they hibernate there or something for a little time ? And then they know that they're every day they , they , they go out and and you know the parent penguins go out and and fish and come back and feed the penguin babies and that's what you know . They come back in at night after having been out during the day fishing and getting food .

And that same island , that Phillip Island , where that is , they also have a koala sanctuary , again really well done with a race , so you can walk along and get kind of like eye view to the koalas , and that's also on Phillip Island . That's also on Phillip Island , yeah , to the koalas , and that's also on philip island .

That's also on philip island , yeah , because koalas are really I think a lot of people find them very disappointing because they sleep all day , so they're not exactly the most exciting animals to go and see , but they're very cute , wow , yeah , my girlfriend always my girlfriend always joke that everything in Australia wants to kill you .

So it's nice that we've got cute animals too . Yeah , absolutely , oh , my goodness , this is so cute . So I'm looking , I'm trying to pan out , okay , so I see where it is now . So it's not in the newborn bay , but the next one , the next one over , yeah , and then there's a French island as well .

Yep , french island isn't habited , but it's not on French Island . But you can take the ferry from Phillip Island to French's Island . Wow , that is so . And if you're , if you're into , if you like animals and you like cute animals , you go to Perth . There's an Island off of Perth and I'm completely blanking .

You take it , you get there from Fremantle and they've got an animal called a quokka and it's about the only place in the world where you can . It's the only place in the world where you get the quokkas and they are , if you like , cute little animals . They're adorable . So it's Q-U-O-K-K-A . Rottnest Island that's the name of it .

Rottn , that's the name of it . Rocknest Island , rot , rotnest , r-o-t-t-n-e-s-t . And the reason it was called that was because the Dutch explorers that discovered . It thought that the quokkas looked like rats . So it's Ratnest Island . Oh my gosh . But they're so cute . And how do you spell that again ? Q ? U , e , q ? U o , k q ? U o , double k ?

A quokka , okay , quokka . Brightness island off of earth . Okay , yeah , I see the island . Okay , cool , this is kind of little things we want to learn about . It's so interesting . So we interviewed someone from south africa . There was penguins down there too , so something about that latitude .

Well , I guess maybe it's like the opposite , probably , of penguins down there too , so something about that latitude . Well , I guess maybe it's like the opposite . Probably have penguins up in um , you know Alaska , well , you only , you only get penguins in the Antarctic . You only get penguins down south .

Oh , okay , penguins are only in the southern hemisphere and polar bears up north , in the northern hemisphere oh my gosh . Oh , it has one that has its arms open like it's gonna hug . It looks like a squirrel , it's , that's a . That's a famous , famous picture .

The guy , basically , because you can , they're super , super friendly , because they're so tame , so you um and you just bike around the island . Yeah , yeah , they're really yeah , so he was , he had a GoPro . I'm sure it's the one that I'm thinking . It looks like he's kind of leaping out to hug you .

Yeah , he had a GoPro and he had this foot and this quokka just kind of left at him and he just caught it just in that Right , it looks like he's smiling like dad or mom or family . Yeah , it looks like it should be in a movie or something . Yeah , yeah , they're very cute and again , you can go up . There's so tame , yeah , you can go .

Yeah , because they're so used to tourists , you know , they're so used to people . Now , you look like . So you just so you hire bikes . When you go to rotten nest , you hire a bike and just you know , you can just bike around the island . And how big are they ? They look some , some of the pictures look like they're pretty decent .

Well , no , no , no , they don't get , they don't get huge , they don't . They're , you know , again , like this , like a big , a cat cat , yeah , that's a small cat , yeah , that's . And I've seen one like on its hind . Almost looks like a kangaroo . So , yeah , tell us about kangaroos . Do you see them ? How ? Where do you have to go to see kangaroos ?

Um , you don't have to go far at all , actually , that's . That's a fun place that we like to take . You know , visitors um uh , so along . So you know , looking at the , the map of melbourne , again , how you ? You know we're on port phillips bay .

If you go along to the towards the west , there's a , a road called the great ocean road and it is one of the nicest , most beautiful drives that you'll do . It's kind of like Big Sur in California . You know , the one from San Francisco down , where it's just amazing beaches and cliffs and things . So along there is a town called Apollo Bay and Lorne .

So in , is it Lorne ? No , it's Anglesey . Anglesey is the one that has a golf course and you get kangaroos on the golf course . So the very first time I ever played golf in my life I was when I was here . My husband took me to Anglesey because we took a drive , a day trip , down the great ocean road .

We went and stopped and played nine holes at Anglesey and there's it's kind of an urban no , not urban . It's a funny story now that there's a great shot of me on the first tee , you know , swinging through and all these kangaroos in the background . But if you look very carefully , the ball hasn't moved . Oh , it's going to happen . Yeah , yeah , yeah .

So are they friendly or mean ? Because I've heard they kangaroos ? Are they friendly or mean because I've heard , um , they , they can , I think . I think they're mainly quite shy and they just will go .

You know they don't tend to like people , yeah , coming close to them , but they can be very aggressive and they can be really dangerous because they've got really long claws and so if you ever watch the , you know the expression , the boxing kangaroos .

They kind of they balance on their tail and they hit each other with their bottom , with their legs , and they've got really long , sharp claws . They can , they can eviscerate you basically . So don't get too close . No , that's and same with same with another other animals called cassowaries , which , if you ever want to see an ugly animal , look up a cassowary .

How do you spell that ? That's c-a-s-s-o-w-a-r-y . They're like a colorful emu with a big blue head , but they've also got these crazy sharp claws that can . So it's like kind of like an emu . You said , yeah , yeah , yeah , beautiful colors , they're almost like a peacock emu , yeah , but they're mean .

So on philip island again , there is a , a small family-run reserve , like nature reserve , where they've got you can hand feed wallabies and kangaroos again . They're so tame now because they're so used to it , but you can hand feed them , um , and then they have emus and cassowaries and koalas , and so you can .

You can do all the all the greatest tips , except for crocodiles . You don't want to do that for sure . Lots of snakes , yeah , yeah , lots of snakes , lots of snakes . And then I saw a fun fact that I was looking about boxes , it says . According to the rspca , melbourne is the fox capital of the world , with 16 to 23 boxes per square kilometer in melbourne .

So they just like they were introduced , or , funnily enough , I have seen them , um , I have seen them at night a couple of times . I've seen them out on the road , um , we live not far from a ?

Um , a public tip , like a waste place , it's not , it's like green waste and recycling and things like that , but there must be enough to lure them there , because I have seen them coming from there at night .

Yeah , I think we introduced , I think , you know for I don't know if it was purely for hunting or if it was also to you know , we have a lot of problems with introduced species that have caused a lot of issues .

Like , um , like the rabbits were introduced , which then went crazy and they had to come up with a , brought in a disease to help kill the rabbits , but myxomatosis , but um , yeah , so you know , cane toads were introduced to help with some bugs in the , in the , in the cane fields up in queensland , and then again they've gone crazy because they have no natural

predators . So they're slowly marching , hopping their way down the country . So where are all the crocodiles ? Is that in Melbourne or no ? No , no , that's , that's um , so , um , queensland .

Um , a lot of times you'll see them at Northern territory as well , like in Darwin , when you get out to um , like the Kakadu and the kimberleys and water holes , and , okay , they like it warm , I take it , they like it warm , all right , and so well , they've got saltwater and freshwater crocodile .

So we've got both , okay , I can never remember which one one of them is more dangerous than the other and I can't remember . I think it's's salt waters that are okay , I'm not going to , I'm not going to make that pronounce it , they're just , but they're huge , you know . You see , see them on the coast sometimes , you know , swimming up on beaches .

All right , so we're at the end of our hour . Kristen , do you have any questions ? I'll go into my rapid fire questions . I'm so loving this . This is so helpful and exciting . I know I have lots of notes and I'm glad this is recorded so I can go back and look up these cool places . So thanks for sharing . Yeah , definitely , thank you

, bitsy . So we talked about religion . What about , um , foods ? Like we heard of vegemite sandwiches , like , is that something very popular there ? Or what are some of your favorite foods ? I know we have a menagerie of you know cultures there , but do you have a favorite ? Yeah , uh , look , I think it's something you have to grow up with .

It's not something you can . It's not something you can kind of , uh , pick up as a , as an adult . I think I like lamingtons . That would I like lamingtons . Lamingtons are great . Lamingtons are lovely . We've got great fruit too . You know great tropical fruit , you know so . Mangoes . We're in the height of mango season now , so that's a real .

You know nothing better than a nice ripe mango , because it drips down your arms as you eat it . There's nothing you can't eat it neatly , it's so messy . And yeah , seafood , yeah , as you eat it . And there's nothing you can't eat it neatly , it's so messy . And yeah , um , seafood , yeah , lots of seafood .

Um , good fruits , any kind of unusual seafood other than , like we know , we have shrimp and tuna and mahi , some different kind of fish that we haven't , maybe might not be popular here . Yeah , well , um , so one of the best eating fish that you'll ever have is called the barramundi , and that's really . You only get that up , really up North .

For North you can get it obviously in restaurants and and and fishmongers , but to catch it it's up North and oh well , on a tangent . But if you like fly fishing , there's great fly fishing in Tasmania . Tasmania , okay , cool , um , all right . And then what's the music like ? Does it just maybe western music or is it influenced from Asia ? What's popular ?

Yeah , oh , look , I think , um , you know , we kind of sit halfway in the well , we're part of the commonwealth , so we get a lot of influence of British music and television , but the same as everywhere else in the world . I think it's all kind of universal . Now , things that are popular tend to be worldwide popular .

One thing that's great is there's been a real focus on Indigenous cultures and Indigenous artists . But there's an Indigenous rap artist named Baker Boy . He's fantastic because he actually raps in his language .

Don't ask me , I can't remember exactly , because there are hundreds of Aboriginal languages , but it's great that that's kind of becoming mainstream , accepted musically and culturally , and there's a real push for recognition of those .

You know kind of movies , television , music , like indigenous stories are gaining a lot more traction , which is fantastic and long overdue and is all your entertainment , streaming stuff now . Cause I just feel like in the last two years we had Netflix , but now we have HBO streaming , disney has their streaming , nbc has their streaming . Is it the same down there ?

Yeah , I don't think we've got our own . I don't believe we have our own streaming services , all of our streaming services . So we've got Netflix , we've got amazon prime , we've got um , we've got one called stan which is a australian owned one , but a lot of it's all of the content .

The majority of the content is from , you know , hbo or or um other you know streaming services in the us . What's the one netflix hulu in the us ? Is it hulu ? Yeah , yeah , we get a lot of the I think . I think stan gets a lot of the hulu content which is the like the , the handmaid's tale and those kind of things .

Yeah , yeah , cool , yeah , so we it's . We do a lot of streaming . I think everybody does now , but yeah , they're popular , okay . So where's the nearest places to surf ? I know , not right in the Melbourne Bay , but do you have to go out a little bit ?

Yeah , yeah , so if you go along , you know , if you go onto the great ocean road , so the first kind of place that you hit is Torquay and that's the start of that whole great ocean road and there's great surfing there . There's actually Bell's beach and Janjok are both part of the surfing the world surfing competition rounds .

Yeah , so it's only two hours , two hour drive with traffic . Oh , wow , that's pretty . Bell's Beach , I see it , it's very close . Yeah , bell's and Janjak are the two that I know . How do you spell Janjak ? It's J , that's uh , jan and then juc , so it's two words . That's right . Next , I think bells beach is next to janjuk . They're very close .

Janjuk , victoria , australia , just zoomed right in , okay , by the bird rock lookout , okay , oh , bird rock , oh , okay , that's not very far at all , it's almost like no , no , it's going to santa cruz from san francisco . Yeah , it's kind of looks a lot like , uh , california , yeah , that .

So that , like I said , that's the start of the great ocean road , which is that , that amazing drive that you can do all the way down to .

You know , you go down to an area called a place called Port Ferry , so most of the time it hugs the coast , it goes inland a little bit , but , yeah , the 12 apostles are along there as well and that's a big tourist draw . What's that ? I think there's only nine of them left , but they were um big rock formations right out off the coast .

So if you look up 12 apostles , okay , let's just find a great ocean road . Oh , there it is . Yeah , oh , oh , beautiful , wow , they're like all these tall rock formations that look like buildings . Yeah , one of them , I think one , collapsed about four or five years ago . They keep collapsing because they're you know , they're ancient .

So there's not , there's not 12 left . Okay , gotcha , nine , eight , seven . It's kind of counting down . Oh , that's great , but that that drive is that ? That drive along the great ocean road is just spectacular .

Like , if you get a , you know , if you have a , if you had a good couple of days and wanted to take it really slow , you could do it in a day . You can , but if you had a couple of days to stopped along the way , and is there some hotels to stay at along the way ?

Yeah , yeah , there's lots of um , there's quite a few um holiday cities or towns along there , all the way along . You know , and you know smaller ones , bigger ones . There's a larger town called lorn , and that's got . You know lots of . You know hotels and and places to stay , but then there's smaller ones that are more kind of residential or lots of camping .

There's lots of campgrounds as well . So if you camp and then walk across to the beach , does it end at the national park there , the great otway , or does it as really , lauren is the ball , it goes over ? So , um , I think the I don't . I don't actually know where the official end of the great ocean road is . I know that .

So , cape ot , there's a lighthouse there and at that Cape Otway lighthouse . The next thing , the next bit of land , is Antarctica . So it's , you get a really strong cold breeze . It can be , it can be 15 , 20 degrees colder there than in Melbourne . Oh , okay , can you get . You know the , you know the the wind straight off antarctica .

It's virtually all right , okay , well , thank you so much , and then I just got the money , but I know about the australian dollar , so it's pretty . Yeah , I know what's the difference between australia . It's , it's , it's just the dollar . We have dollars and cents , but it's um , it's what's it ? Now I think it's sitting at about 75 cents us .

Yeah , yeah , it fluctuates . It's not , it's not tied . It fluctuates , but you know , there have been times when we've had near parity , but just depends on the strength of the us dollar and the weakness of the australian dollar . Okay , well , thank you , bitsy , so nice to meet you and talk with you . You too .

This is really great and , um , we'll let you know when it's ready to preview . Yeah , australia is definitely on my list and this is all of those places sound amazing and I want to check them all out . Yeah , love to come for a long time . Yeah , just travel around the entire , do the circuit , do that . Six months , absolutely , perfect , wonderful .

Thank you so much . Thanks , guys . Enjoy your Friday . Bye , bye , bye , bye . If you enjoy our podcast , be sure to subscribe to our show .

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