Moomba Parade - 蒙巴节
March 9
Today is a public holiday, Labor Day in Australia. The City of Melbourne also held the Moomba Festival over the weekend. The festival ends today with the Moomba Parade. The origin of the Moomba Festival might be controversial but based on what we saw, the Moomba Parade is just another multi-cultural celebration today. We took a bus from Blackburn to Melbourne downtown. Melbourne also has a transportation card with a daily limit of $9.00. The parade started at 10:45 AM. It was led by an Aboriginal group which was then followed by different floats with different ethnic groups and dance studios to show various cultures and performances. There were two dragon dances in the parade. There were a lot of people watching the parade - the coronavirus didn’t seem to scare people away. After the parade, we went to the National Gallery of Art. We had a simple lunch/snack in the café. We spent about an hour in their European Gallery. The museum is free except for the special exhibitions.
Afterwards, we walked to Shrine of Remembrance and other attractions nearby. We wanted to see the ocean too. We rode #16 light rail to St. Kilda Beach. The weather was perfect and the beach was beautiful. We stopped at a café guarded by two statures of a rabbit and a dog holding latte. We took a picture of them and that is the place to have another round of latte. We found a table sitting down with and that table number is 322. What a coincidence!
We watched people kiteboarding on the beach and running/walking along the beach. It looked like a perfect summer vacation place, beautiful and relaxing. We could spend another day or two there, but we needed to meet our friend in Chinatown for dinner.
St.Kilda Beach
We rode another train to Crown Casino first. We strolled around the area then went to a Chinese Restaurant for dinner. We had the Lucky Crab cooked with goose liver paste sauce. The Lucky Crab, as the restaurant calls it, is a deep sea white crab, similar to Crystal Crab online. Interestingly, cooked crab remained white, not red like typical cooked crab. The dish was delicious. It was one of the best crab dishes we have had but it was not cheap - $350 for the crab. The dinner was very good. We all say Australia has the best Chinese cuisine including China but they are not cheap. We had good time.
