On May 8 we toured the State Library of Victoria, which is an impressive complex in the core of Melbourne. We admired some of the rare and unusual books on display, and went up to the walkway around the top of the rotunda for a view of the reading room below.

Diane then had to go off to lunch with a business colleague, so I toured the Melbourne Museum — a combined history and science museum. I have to say I found the science side much more interesting than the history side. To a certain extent the history exhibits were a kind of "municipal attic" where they put things they don't want to throw away yet: an exhaustive collection of different kinds of barbed wire, the stuffed and mounted remains of the race horse Phar Lap, political memorabilia from Victoria's days as an un-federated colony, etc.

Meanwhile the science museum was very impressive, particularly the geology and paleontology collection. The museum curators took an unconventional — and, to my mind, extremely wise — approach. Instead of having a section about rocks and minerals (and their Economic Importance), and a separate display of fossils, the two collections are integrated, so you can see the formation of Australia's rocks from before the existence of life, then both fossils and minerals over the past billion years.

The star of the show is the Melbourne Museum's Triceratops skeleton, the most complete specimen in the world. It's from Hell Creek in Montana, and has its own gallery with groovy lighting that changes to show what a Triceratops skeleton looks like in different colors.

I strolled past the Victorian Parliament building (which looks exactly like a Victorian Parliament building), lunched in Melbourne's Chinatown district, and finally got back to the hotel in time for a nap.

That evening we went to Melbourne's center of arty hipness, Fed Square, to see a showing of the Japanese anime Metropolis. It doesn't have very much to do with Fritz Lang's silent film — but it's also a whole lot more entertaining.

On Friday the 9th we navigated the Melbourne commuter rail system to reach the rental agency in South Yarra where we picked up our rental car. Though we both were listed as drivers in the rental agreement, Diane was the one who actually steered the car around for the next week, as she had four months of practice with Australia's reverse-polarity cars and roads.

Our first destination was back to our hotel, where we handed the car over to the valet parking service and then walked to the Victoria Market on the northwest side of Melbourne, where we met our friends M. and R. for an afternoon and evening of wine-drinking, food shopping, cooking, and dining. The whole experience was delightful.

The following day we left town, which will be the subject of the next few posts. In sum, our Melbourne visit wound up being much more about meeting and chatting with people, whereas the Sydney visit was about touring the place.