Last Wednesday afternoon, I headed to Melbourne for three nights to complete some training. The course will help make up 150 hours on my continuing professional development to help me become a certified engineer. This is one of my annual goals – getting my certification!
Naturally, I can’t enter a hotel room now without taking photos, so I figured I may as well share:
This was the Holiday Inn on Flinders, which is well located when your course is in the same building! I didn’t get much ‘sight seeing’ other than inside the course room for 16 hours, so the photos are of the little quirky things I did see.
Back to my room, the pillow ‘menu’. There were “hard” ones too!
Breakfast wasn’t included in my room rate (well I never asked?!) so I headed out each morning to get a coffee and something to eat. The first morning I got a fruit salad, but the photo seems have gotten lost. The next day, I went all out!
I was a lovely place, the Grain House, and I did break my attempts at being gluten free. It was lovely a venue, and they were totally flummoxed I didn’t order coffee (repeatedly). See, my course had great coffee/hot chocolate!
After two nights in a hotel, I’d used my ‘freebie’ and moved to stay with my friend in South Melbourne. I’ve known this friend since school (she was my boarding house supervisor). In that time, she’s lived in Germany twice, me in France once. In addition, I’ve visited her twice in Germany and once in Brisbane (when she was visiting her parents), and she’s visited me in Paris and in Sydney. We certainly are jetsetters!
We had a pretty leisurely evening together and morning before my Saturday afternoon flight back to Sydney. We did so much walking!! Though, the walking was worth it, for the things we ate (not all of it was I ‘blogger’ like for, so there’s no photos of delicious gnocchi or pear & nutella pizza or my pastry!)
Wow, my phone takes great photos in good light (and horrible photos in bad, as seen below!)
As you can see, burgers and slaw are my thing – and… whilst i don’t have a file photo, so is Mac and Cheese! The BF cooks it to ‘pick me up’ pretty regularly.
Speaking of – I came home to a beautiful bunch of my favourite flowers, which I (of course) have forgotten to photograph. I’ll get a snap as they open up nicely. There you have it, a mini break in Melbourne in pictures.
It's great that you did your certification hours in such a nice setting. You've got me curious about the pear and nutella pizza – was it for brunch or dinner? Did it have anything savoury on it?
It was a dessert – so it was a baked piece of pastry in a sort of cup cup shape (sweet I think, but it wasn't clear), with nutella labelled over slices of pear. TASTY! Though we were hunting a flat pizza with lashing of nutella that we'd seen the chef make earlier in the night.
Tags on the pillows seems strange to me, but that breakfast shop is so cute! What was that across the pancakes? You really are quite the jet setter. 🙂 and what a nice surprise to come home to flowers. You've got a good guy there.
I had to laugh at them being beffudled when you didn’t order coffee! Melbournians are so into their coffee! I hope you had a fun trip and got lots accomplished with the certification!
I threw them for six, that's for sure! (The day before I bought coffee one place, then ate in for fruit salad at another – I bought the coffee without inspecting said fruit salad… one had too much melon, and you know what I think about melon!) I must make some time to polish the remaining two 'horrid' episode reports, and then I'm pretty close to applying for certification!
I'm staying in a Holiday Inn right now…with the exact same pillow tags 🙂 We had breakfast included so no lovely pancakes for us!
How great that you got to catch up with your friend and move further towards your certification 🙂
Oh wow, Holiday Inn is so standardised, it would seem! It was my first stay with them, and it was pretty good. Thanks for stopping by mid holiday/trip!
Looks like you had a great time 🙂 I heard that the sun has started to come out in Melbourne after the winter, so you picked a good time to go 🙂
It was so lovely – not at all what I've come to expect from Melbourne!
The pillow's soft; shame about the tag!
So the Melbourne trip was all about – study, food and catching up with friend!
As I non-coffee drinker and hater of eating breakfast out, what would Melbournians make of me. I love tea. Such a quiet and reposeful drink.
How sweet to have flowers for your return.
Oh how can you hate breakfast out? I love that! But Melbourne would be perplexed indeed :p I did get a lot done in my three days away though.