Melbourne was just hit by the most ferocious of storms that I have ever seen here. For around 15 minutes ferocious gusts of wind and heavy rain and hail bucketed down over Melbourne with some of the hail stones the size golf balls. People on the streets were frantically running for cover as small tree branches and leaves were seemingly falling from the sky. The State Emergency Service (SES) is going to have a busy night tonight.

Below is a photo of Dudley St on the edge of Melbourne’s CBD just after the aftermath of storm.

It’s already March 2010 and it’s definitely been way too long since my last post. Since coming back to Melbourne from London late October last year I’ve been so busy getting my life back on track and haven’t had much time to blog.

I’ve got some time now so I thought I’d start the New Year (a couple of months late I know haha) with some posts. On the way home from London to Melbourne my girlfriend and I stopped over in New York, LA and Las Vegas. For the sake of keeping the size of this post sane I’ll be writing up a separate post for each city.

Anyways, to kick things off here’s a photo of a globe that I took in the old immigration centre on Ellis Island, New York/New Jersey. I thought it would be a good idea to point out my current location just in case anyone doesn’t know where Melbourne is.

It’s been a little over 12 months since I got back from my year living in Saigon and now it’s time to head off again. This time it’s across to the other side of the world to London. I’ll be travelling with my girlfriend Xuan and we’ll be basing ourselves there for a year long working holiday. Our flight leaves tomorrow night for Singapore. We’ll be spending a few days in Saigon and Singapore before making our way to London. It’s going to be so much fun!

I’ll leave with a photo I took today of the Melbourne city skyline which was taken from Skyline Drive in Maribyrnong, a suburb in Melbourne’s inner west.

Last night we headed into the city in Melbourne to take some photos. Xuan had her brother’s old SLR and she wanted to experiment with some night photography. It also gave me a chance to play around with my new Canon IXUS 960 IS compact digital camera that I recently picked up.

Although the quality of the night shots taken with my compact camera don’t really compare to those of the SLR, it still managed to take some reasonable photos after some playing around with the shutter speed settings. The photo below was one of the better shots taken with the compact. It is of the Yarra River taken from the bridge on St Kilda Road. On the left is Southbank and the right is Flinders Street Station.

Xuan and I headed down to the Yarra Bank Reserve in Burnley (An inner city suburb of Melbourne) yesterday afternoon to get a bit of outdoorsy time. I’ve never been to this part of the Yarra River so it was nice to get out for a walk and take a few photos.

The park has a nice walking track along the river, a public barbecue area and a small playground. Here are a few photos I took on the day. Photos 2 and 9 were taken by Xuan.