Melbourne, the second largest city in Australia, with 4.4M inhabitants is set to surpass Sydney as the largest city by the year 2030.

In the past few days we had several opportunities to walk around the city and get a feel for it. It’s a mix of old buildings being shadowed by high modern skyscrapers. I think I saw at least 3 skyscrapers over 70 floors that are being build at the moment. The city had an golden era during mid 19th century when gold has been found in the area around it. Since then it has competed with Sydney for the most influence city of Australia.

The city is relatively clean – for a big city, with lots of parks, trees and greenery. Sadly since it’s winter here most of the trees are leafless. It is winter here and the weather is quite weird. It is constantly changing in 1 hour it rained 2 times, there was a hail and sun with clear sky above the city showed for 2 times. The temperature currently are around 5-10 in the morning and can get up to 15 in the afternoon. When the sun is out it can be quite worm, if there is no wind, which is rarely. We really wish we would have brought more winter clothing with us.

The city also boasts the oldest china town in the world. And has tons largest, fastest, longest, biggest … in the southern hemisphere, which literary means Australia and New Zeland (well you have a bit of South America and Africa as well).

As said before, view from our hotel is surprisingly good, but even a 28th store building gets dwarfed by the tallest building in Melbourne – Eureka and it’s skydeck. Today we had a chance to go up there on a 88th floor. It’s incredible how large the metropolitan area is, you can barely see the edge of the city when the lights get up. It’s in the 25th largest cities in the world by the city area, despite only having 4.4M inhabitants.