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Apr

Hot to shop: Adelaide

Adelaide Arcade pic credit: Sun Herald

For vintage fashion, antiques and contemporary design, this city is streets ahead. We’re talking Adelaide. Yes, Adelaide. Canny eastern states bargain hunters are well aware of the great deals to be had in the city of churches, sex shops and hydroponic gardeners (and we’re not talking tomatoes here).

And with the addition of some cool new markets and ramped-up fashion, the city could possibly be getting rid of its love-hate relationship with Sydney & Melbourne (love to run away there, hate it when others run away there…)

To read more, click here

Apr

Open-air drama in Melbourne’s skies

ONE of my pet hates is staying in hotel rooms where you can’t open the windows. I understand, in extreme circumstances, that annoying hotel guests might muck up the aircon, say, in a Dubai summer or a Helsinki winter. But in balmy Australia?

Ok, so ‘balmy’ might be pushing it in autumnal Melbourne at the mo, but it was deliciously sunny the days I visited the Langham Hotel, on Southbank. To read more about the hotel and its new terrace rooms, click here.

Mar

More bang for your baht in Bangkok

MBK, you big, beautiful monster, I miss you!

Someone told me recently they couldn’t understand the hype about Bangkok’s best budget shopping mall, but then they don’t know about the fantastic little camera shop on the ground floor, Nice Face spa that will set your toes a-twinkling for a few baht up on the fifth, just near the fantastic food court and they don’t know about the awesome watch I bought there a few years ago, that only just conked out, to my dismay.

Click here to read more…

Mar

Kyneton: Cool Piper calls the tune

Prunella’s florist on Kyneton’s Piper St.

Cafes and galleries open at a rate of knots, yet there’s still a tractor shop in Kyneton’s hip main drag. How groovy can one town get?

IT’S a windy, rainy night, yet one street in this wee country town is buzzing with a crowd sipping sparkling wine and snacking while making dinner plans. Obviously country Victoria has changed since I last stuck my foot past Melbourne’s city limits sign.

To read more, click here

Mar

Hot to shop: Noosa

It’s not just about the surf and sand in this Sunshine Coast town, in Queensland.

Noosa is where the beautiful people gather to frolic on Main Beach, in between coffee, drinks and dinner on the pavement or by the window of the latest new restaurant; this scene’s all about being seen, especially if you’re fit, fabulous and tanned deep brown.

They’ll be newly-arrived Melburnians lurking in the shadows in their southerner’s black rags and milk-white skin.

Don’t have a kaftan/surf board to fit the smart set? Look no further it’s hot to shop Noosa…

Feb

Liquid diet only at Ponyfish Island

Ponyfish Island – this pic should help you find it!

In my continued (and futile) quest to stay with the pack on new Melbourne café openings, I finally got to Ponyfish Island.

The signs were good: a sunny day, the Yarra River flowing brownly past, my café companion, GG, found the place under his own steam. This is no mean feat. Try describing where Ponyfish Island is: it’s on a pylon supporting one of the footbridges that runs across the river between Flinders St Station and Southbank.

Yeah, easy.

Anyway, Ponyfish Island has actually been around for a while, but despite its amazing location in the middle of the river, it just hadn’t taken off. New owners and a liquor licence have fixed all that, and last Thursday afternoon, the place was heaving. Literally heaving, with good music and happy punters enjoying an after-work jam jar of wine (tres egalitarian, what, serving wine in a jam jar).

We’d planned to hit the island for lunch, so popped in on Friday, scoring a table by the water at 12.30pm. We ordered: GG had the gnocchi and I went simplistic with a toasted sandwich with spinach, cheese and tomato. We had plenty to talk about but when a youth wandered past with gnocchi and sandwich, we hailed him over.

No, this can’t be your order. You haven’t been waiting long enough, he told us.

Fifteen minutes for a toastie isn’t long enough? I asked.

Not in this place, he said with a little laugh, oblivious to the two journalists committing his nonchalance to memory for future blogging.

It turned out it was our order. Reader, before we ate, we played ‘spot the spinach’ (I won, espying two tiny, wilted leaves tucked in one corner of the no-name white bread offering) and GG’s gnocchi was cold.

The day was sunny, the conversation good, the food queue was long; we gave up and ate.

It may have been a fool’s errand but we also ordered coffee. I placed the order at the counter and then asked, will it be long, as we’ve got to get back to work. The barista heard us and grinned. I’m all over it, he told me. Nevertheless, ignore all the other orders and make ours first, I suggested blithely.

Two seconds later, he appeared with my flat white and GG’s double piccolo, both beautifully executed in delicious Niccolo coffee.

The moral of the story: put nothing solid, I repeat, nothing solid, in your mouth on Ponyfish Island, and treat it like the beautifully ambient bar that it is.

Open 8am till 1am.

Feb

Greetings from the world’s second-most livable city

We Melburnians were disgruntled on Facebook this morning: 11 degrees and raining…in February, our summer. If we’d read the newspapers before the weather report, we should have been happier, as Melbourne has been voted the second most livable city in the world, after the perpetual chart-topper, Canada’s Vancouver which, incidentally, was today experiencing temperatures of just one degrees, and rain .

I like Vancouver: the food is amazing, the scenery beautiful, snowfields and ocean close by. But if I had to choose between the two, I’d still choose Melbourne. It’s those extra 10 degrees. In Vancouver, joggers wear full bodysuits and having been there in December, I can tell you that Melbourne does not have snow drifts like Vancouver has snow drifts.

In the comments following this story in the Sydney Morning Herald, I note that no Sydneysider was begrudging Melbourne its position – Sydney was down in 7th place, just above two more Australian cities, lonely Perth and suburban Adelaide, in tied eighth place. That makes four of the top 10 cities as Aussie hotspots. In fact, most Sydneysiders were laughing at the idea that Sydney’s such a great place to live, quoting bad health and transport systems and outrageous costs of living: true, true and true. Those blissful beaches give a lot back to the city.

It could be worse, Sydneysiders. You could be living in one of the bottom 10: say Harare, Dhaka or perhaps Port Moresby. Poor Tehran, there it is as the eighth-worst city in the world, when it actually has good food, shopping and marvellous scenery nearby.

If you’re interested in the full story of the world’s most livable cities, click here to read the Sydney Morning Herald’s take on it all.

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s top and bottom 10 cities of the world:

1. Vancouver, Canada

2. Melbourne, Australia

3. Vienna, Austria

4. Toronto, Canada

5. Calgary, Canada

6. Helsinki, Finland

7. Sydney, Australia

8. (equal) Perth, Australia

8. (equal) Adelaide, Australia

10. Auckland, New Zealand

The bottom 10 cities were:

1. Harare, Zimbabwe (worst)

2. Dhaka , Bangladesh

3. Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea

4. Lagos, Nigeria

5. Algiers , Algeria

6. Karachi, Pakistan

7. Douala, Cameroon

8. Tehran, Iran

9. Dakar, Senegal

10. Colombo, Sri Lanka

Feb

Tagging, bombing, paste-ups, can control… street art in Melbourne

Pic credit: Metro Gallery

If you thought that all that graffiti along the train lines was just kids wasting time, being destructive, you are just soooooo last century. This is art, baby, art.

Well, that’s the point of view if you’re a street artist/graffiti artist/urban artist – whatever you want to call yourself.

“Those kids tagging (leaving their signatures along the train lines) are creating their identity, and they’re learning such skills as can control,” one street artist told me recently. So tagging’s the street artist’s equivalent of the schoolkid’s ‘Goz woz ‘ere’ engraving on trees and desks, I guess.

Excitingly, Melbourne is currently hosting the only Australian exhibition of US street art poster girl Swoon (yes, they all have nicknames, as the same guy told me, who wants to sign themselves ‘John’? Mind you, with a real name of Caledonia Dance Curry, she’s got plenty to work with here.)

Swoon has been doing paste-ups in the US for the past decade – that’s where she’ll draw or block print something on paper and stick it up on a public wall, as opposed to getting out there with the aerosol cans. Her work is lyrical, feminine and very beautiful. In the gallery setting, it was sprinkled with gold and layered with stencils and paper collages. Much of the work was already sold before the exhibition opened, with the gallery’s minions hopefully wielding red spot stickers. And to prove there’s money in art, the most expensive piece (at the time unsold) was priced at $25,500.

She turned up in jeans, sneakers and a white painted singlet with a bumbag (yes, really), while Jeff Kennett, who I accidentally banged into, looked positively unhip in his suit with a floral-clad wife in tow.
Get in quick, the exhibition runs till just 3 March at Metro Gallery, 1214 High St, Armadale.

And if you’d like to see more Melbourne street art, click here for a pix from a walking tour I did recently through the CBD’s laneways.

Feb

For a dip, drop and shop

The pool is the lure and the cure on a bright Dubai morning.

When in doubt, go to Dubai. So what that it’s 14 hours’ flight from Australia.

FACT: the best way to cure pending jet lag is to jump straight off the plane and into a pool.

Click here to read more…

Feb

Hot to shop: Cairo

In the printed media business, we work with interesting timings: to wit the publication of the Sun Herald’s Hot to Shop: Cairo, just as the riots were taking hold, when shops were either closed against the demonstrations, or being forceably opened by looters.

As was said to me recently, it could have been worse: London’s The Guardian published a story on Cairo for kids at the height of the demonstrations. Damn those long lead times!

Look on the bright side, travellers! Cairo is going to be dirt cheap in the coming months – if the government gets its act together. Having read the news reports about the French supermarket chain Carrefour being looted to blazes, I have to wonder what the looters really thought they’d do with all that weird foreign food: pesto, risotto, thai curry paste…

Well, if Queensland can mount an advertising campaign to lure back lost tourists after a swathe of natural disasters (floods, cyclones, more floods), why not Cairo? It may be a few weeks to early, but the Occidental Tourist likes to stay ahead of the pack.

So if you’re heading for Egypt some time soon, here are my hot tips for the best shopping in the Victorious City, more…

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