Melbourne: Day 4

Today most of the city had re-opened, so we started off the morning by doing a little shopping, but the big event of the day was our trip to the Melbourne Cricket Grounds (MCG) to watch our first AFL game (Australian Rules Football). The MCG was built in 1853 and even acted as an Olympic venue when Melbourne hosted the 1956 games (the first in the southern hemisphere). Today Melbourne was playing Collingwood and our tickets put us right in the middle of the Collingwood section.

This being our first game, we spent the first half trying to figure out how the game was played. It was fast-moving and high scoring, making it exciting to watch. There are 15 players on the field and two sets of goal posts, inner and outer. Scoring between the inner post is a goal and earns you 6 points and scoring between the outer set is called a behind and earns you 1 point. They play in quarters, somewhere around 30 minutes, but it is like soccer, so they never stop the clock during the quarter and make up time on the end, so you are never quite sure when the period is over.

We ended up watching an awesome game.  Melbourne, which was the underdog, was up 2 scores (12 points) going into the 4th quarter, but Colliingwood came back to take the lead by one with a few minutes left in the game.  Melbourne then proceeded to drive down the field and in the last seconds of desperation kicked the ball to an open man right in front of the posts.  He bobbled the ball and dropped it just as time ran out.  It made for a super exciting finish.

As we had been sitting in the sun for the entire game, we were quite hot.  Off we headed across the river to the South Gate district to enjoy a cold beverage.  After watching the sun set on the city, it was time for dinner.  We choose the swanky Taxi Room restaurant to celebrate our last night in Melbourne.  The taxi room sits in the corner of federation square overlooking the square and city on one side and the river on the other side.  Of course as this being a popular restaurant, and us being without reservations, we had to wait until nine to get a table.  No big deal we wandered around the city enjoying the people watching in the restaurant windows and on the streets.  Our dinner turned out to be a very pleasant evening, not the best food we had tasted, but good none the less.