Neighborhood: Pigdon Street to Princes Park

This afternoon after his day at work, Daniel and I met at the French bakery, Filou's Patisserie, down the street from us to try out their pastries and coffee (if you can't tell from my Facebook statuses, we are having lots of fun trying out all the great eateries that are walking distance from us!) This place was great, since their coffee and pastries were excellent, the server was actually French, and we got bonus flat whites (which is the iconic espresso drink in Melbourne, for those of you that haven't heard of it...basically a latte with less foam) because the server sloshed some of our original coffees we ordered into the saucers when she carried them to our table, and she felt so bad about it that she gave us both a flat white to go to make up for it (even though we really weren't very upset the little spill).

After our afternoon snack, we decided to explore another part of our area we hadn't been in yet, and headed down a street near us (Pigdon) toward one of Melbourne's many parks (Princes Park). We remembered to bring a camera this time, so I thought I'd share our photos.

The intersection of Pigdon and Lygon (I love the trees in the median)

This is a tram, which is pretty much the predominant way to get around in the city, though there are also buses, trains and cabs, all of which are also frequently used. Melbourne is one of the few cities in the world to use trams like this. They're pretty neat...you can see they're attached to cables above them, and they run on tracks laid into the roads. Sometimes they have their own lane in traffic, like here, and sometimes they actually run in the same lanes as the cars (which makes driving in Melbourne pretty unique).

Daniel at Princes Park

An Australian bird...I think, based on my Google searching, that this is an Australian magpie, though I could be wrong, as I'm really bad at bird identification. Regardless, the birds here in Australia sound really different from birds in the US...they were one of the strangest things for me to get used to when we came here.

Some of Melbourne's pretty Victorian architecture

Fountain in Princes Park

Tree lined path in Princes Park

More Victorian architecture (this is someone's house!)

I love these flowers. Don't know what they're called, but lots of people have them in their gardens here, and they're just gorgeous.

This looks like a random picture, but I was trying to get a picture of all the chimneytops...they're just so old fashioned looking...I love them :)

The Greek Orthodox church near us...looking at this picture, the road to the left is the one we live down.

The laundromat and cafe up the street from us...looking at the picture of the church above, if you cross our street (on the left of the church) these are just down from there.

Daniel outside the beautiful florist just a bit farther down from the cafe and laundromat...this florist set out several plants one night that weren't quite high quality enough for them to sell with a sign asking someone to take them, so we have them now :)

The florist's sidewalk display during business hours...I love getting to walk past this pretty much every day :)

The 24 hour florist, just across the street from the florist above

Daniel at our street sign

And again

Me beside the Greek church...I do wear outfits besides this red dress, I promise, I just always seem to wear it on days we take photos.

So finally some Melbourne photos for everyone! Next up will hopefully be a post about our terrace, as we've finally started to get it into decent enough shape to take pictures and show it off :)

Love,
Victoria