To start off, I don't think I mentioned that we booked flights to Auckland (New Zealand) for the morning of November 2. It turns out that Tues. Nov. 2 is also the day of the Melbourne Cup, AKA the horse race that is the biggest sporting event in the country and is a national holiday in Australia. And it's the 150th anniversary of the race. And we're going to go to New Zealand hours before it happens. Oh well, horse races are boring anyways. Okay, with that out of the way I'll move on to today's events.
Slept until noon with the best sleep in ages, due probably to the huge duvet and 2 pillows (versus the one thin pillow and sheet that most other hostels offer). So breakfast...errr lunch, I suppose, was eggs and toast, then the day truly began. We walked over to the train station and got some day tickets then took a train into downtown. We had no real idea of what there was to do or where anything was, so we wandered around until we came across a cool looking building and went inside. Besides offices, there was a funky museum called the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. We headed in (free admission!) and went downstairs to the exhibits. There are 3 exhibits, but one had just ended its tenure, so it was closed. We entered the second one called The Raft, which was a video on the wall of people being drenched with high-powered fire hoses in slow motion. Ohhh, I see, it's going to be another weird modern art museum, that sucks. We exited the room and popped into the third gallery. This turned out to be a pleasant surprise. In this massive room were several exhibits. First, you could interact with a board that displayed the history and development of film and effects. Then we read a little comic book with special goggles that allowed augmented reality to occur. Augmented reality is when some part of the image on the page triggers a 3d image to pop up and play like a video. Not like magic eye, like the page has a comic drawn on it, you look through the glasses, the page goes white and a little scene pops up with 3D characters and a scene plays out. Difficult to explain, easier if you check that phenomenon out on Youtube. Then we moved on to several stations that displayed the development of video games through the years, with a game you could play from each generation, ranging from Atari to old PC to Nintendo, to Playstation to Wii, etc. There was a room past this that you had to go past 2 black curtains to access. The room was completely dark, with a smoke machine slowly releasing fake smoke with one projector in the room that projected only a thin pattern of light across the room onto the wall. So what you could see was the light shape all the way through the room (because of the smoke) and you could fan the hazy air to see the smoke patterns alter. You could also stand on the far wall (where the image was projected onto) and watch as the other person walked towards the projector and it would look like they slowly disappeared under water. Very cool illusions. Popped back out into the gallery and in front of another screen that altered your shadow to look like crazy creatures or monsters, meant to imitate what we would do as kids with shadows. It was accompanied with sound also to make a really interesting display. After this was a room with a spinning ferris wheel sort of display, then a strobe light went on making the thing look like a movie. Bizarre and cool. Then came the sweetest part. A bullettime film chamber. Bullettime is a film technique used by movies like the Matrix to film super slow, rotating sequences (like when Neo slowly leans back as bullets fire at him). This place had a round room with a ton of cameras in a circle that filmed a short clip of you and turned it into a bullettime clip that got emailed to you if you wanted. See Brennan and my interpretation of the Matrix scene here: http://www.acmi.net.au/timeslice/Timeslice.htm?file=ts-20101028-ed7de87487c6c8f4e7cde532a7c6e202.flv (might have to copy/paste into your address bar and hit enter). Then we saw some clips of famous Aussie films and tv shows (or ones that had some Aussie involved in some way...they are pretty loose with the term Australian production). Walked quickly past the boring examples of media involving Aboriginees (they always have to mention them it seems) and headed back out to the streets.
From here we saw something I have wanted to stand in front of for years. Rod Laver Arena. The dome where the Australian Open of tennis is held each year. We walked over a bridge and down the riverbank for awhile to get to it. The river is brown and gross looking here, but there were loads of people rowing on it. We arrived shortly at the Arena, which was closed, but got some good photos (soon to be on FB) and walked past loads of tennis courts (they have a ton of little ones there, like more than 20!) and 2 other huge stadiums, one of which is for cricket and not sure what the other is for. Then we headed up the river and across again and located a Subway restaurant (which we've been searching for since we've got to Melbourne) and enjoyed a delicious (and healthy) meal. Today is the opening day for the movie The Social Network in Australia so we walked over to the Melbourne Central mall (huge and 3 stories tall with an enormous glass cone atrium roof) and got a ticket (20 dollars, what a scam!). Waited around for the doors to open and then enjoyed what Hollywood had to offer. Good movie and after it ended I fully expected to walk out the doors into the cold night air of Saskatoon until I heard a Aussie bloke start chatting. I guess because I've seen so many movies in Saskatoon that I am almost transported there whenever I see a movie elsewhere. Took the train back to our 'hood and walked back to hostel without coming across any sketchy characters (success!). Spent some time online, had a late supper then back to sleep.
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