a bit on Melbourne and Sydney

I am sure I mentioned it before, but I really like Melbourne. The locals seem more open and friendly than Sydneysiders. Example; while standing in a road, taking a picture of a graffiti strewn wall, two cars stopped and waited for me to finish. In Sydney two cars would have stopped so the occupants could get out and beat me to a pulp. Sydney is a brash, arrogant place (if a place can be arrogant?) while Melbourne is more self assured (if a place can be self assured.) Architecturally and culturally Sydney does not try too hard. It sort of shouts "we've got the Harbour! We've got the Opera house! We've got the Bridge! Fuck, YEAH!" and promptly rests upon it laurels . Melbourne has no big hitter. Sure, Flinders Street station is very easy on the eye and Port Philip Bay is lovely, but they're not big-league. So Melbourne compensates with lots of other things done well. There is art all over the place, sculptures dotted al over the city; the graffiti is better (far less mindless tagging or far more quality to counter balance it - not sure). The cafes are nicer and run by people who genuinely seem to want to run cafes, not by people waiting for something better to magically happen to them.

The cafe thing is a direct result of the different licensing laws in Victoria and New South Wales, and that could feed into why Melbourne has a better vibe than Sydney. In Melbourne you can get a liquor license quite easily and cheaply and lots of cafes do and lots of cafes sell beer and wine and you can go out and relax and all is well with the world. As I understand it, you can get a liquor license quite easily in New South Wales as long as you pay through the arse for it. So cafes cannot afford them and pubs have to sell a lot of grog and get a lot of revenue from gaming machines in order to make having the licence economically viable. So Sydney's drinking scene is big and brash - a bit like English inner cities, sad to say. Even if you go to a smaller, more relaxed pub you'll still find a room of poker machines. It gets worse. Throughout New South Wales there has been a consolidation of drinking establishments, of a sort. Smaller pubs can sell their gaming licenses - and there are only so many in existence - and when they hit hard times they do. To the highest bidder. Usually big beer-barn places. So smaller places go bust - often in rural areas - and the cities fill up with huge soulless barns, all laminate floor and loud music and a younger crown hitting it hard.

Come on NSW, put aside the point scoring, admit Victoria gets some things right and sort it out. We'll still be the Harbour City with the beaches and the house and the bridge. Only maybe without so many twats.

Of course I may have my holiday head on when in Melbourne. Rose tinted glasses? I don't think so. Incidentally, while we were in Melbourne a group of blokes in a Hummer stopped to beat a guy to a pulp, so it is a proper big city.