We spent the day in Melbourne today. After breakfast, we picked up the "City Circle Tram" (streetcar) and went around the downtown area, about 3 miles or so. Here's a pic of our fine conveyence:
Actually, Melbourne has an extensive public transit system, with buses, rail lines, and streetcar lines going all over the place. The downtown area was awash with streetcars...haven't seen these things in decades:
We stopped at a stop near the Royal Exhibition Building and the Melbourne Museum. Both are located on Carlton Gardens, with the Exhibition Building having been built in 1880 to house an exhibition of all the modern inventions of the Industrial Age. The Building itself was huge and beautifully maintained. Here you can see a fountain in the front of the building with the building in the background:
We walked on over to the Melbourne, which was having an exhibition titled "Designing 007: 50 Years of Bond Style." This was really cool. They had exhibits of a bunch of the costumes and props from the James Bond movies going back to Dr. No in 1962. Included in the exhibit was the original Aston Martin from 1964's Goldfinger:
Here's a shot of the inside of the Museum just outside the exhibit itself:
Unfortunately, we couldn't take any pictures inside the exhibit, but they had some really, really cool movie memorabilia.
After taking in the Bond exhibit, we wandered on through the museum. The displays included a history of the Melbourne area with a lot of artifacts, displays of the flora and fauna of the region, aboriginal history, and pretty neat displays describing how the earth was created and how life developed over time. They had the skeleton of a number of dinosaurs recovered from Australia. This is a pteradactyl:
We had a really nice time in the museum and were surprised when they ran us out at 5:00 pm. We left the museum and walked down the street to St. Patrick's Cathedral, which was very imposing:
We had a great time in Melbourne today and we're spending the day tomorrow catching more of the sights in the downtown area!
Pat's Paragraph............ I thought for sure Roger would have the pictures of the skeleton of the blue whale that washed ashore in the 90's. The museum had an entire crew working on the remains and it took them 8 years to complete the project and build the display area. The entire museum was really well done with touch screens for information, 3-D movies, live exhibits of some animals and had built an actual rain forest in the atrium area. They had hands-on displays like playing a real victrola, touching fossilized dinosaur eggs, fossilized shark teeth, fossilized bones, huge rock crystals, gemstones still in the matrix, lava floes and the list goes on and on.
The Bond exhibit was huge with over 400 items from the movies and even the 1st edition books written by Ian Fleming. The steel hat that was worn by Oddjob in GOLDFINGER came up missing after the movie shooting was over. It turned up later for sale at a famous auction house and sold for 32,000.00 British pounds. A lot of the items in the films were stolen and the only ones still in existence were in the exhibit, like Scaramanga's gold gun from THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN and all but one of the gold ingots with the Nazi stamp on them from GOLDFINGER. The original costumes were there, set in a scene like you were on the movie set. You could even buy copies of the jewelry worn by all the Bond girls. There were short clips of the films running all through the exhibit, like the one when Roger Moore skies off the cliff and the parachute opens with the Union Jack. It was there.
