The weekend was full of catching up with friends – eating and drinking and celebrating Chinese New Year together. The change of weather to a bit of coolness was appreciated and we wandered out to the city in the morning for the Sustainable Living Festival which happens over the month of February. My friend suggested we catch up and check it out and the young girls made a small bird treehouse and Ash enjoyed a story making workshop and created a space ship out of recycled materials as a part of his story of escaping earth and finding new life on another planet (each child wrote their interpretation of this concept). Artplay by Federation Square has many events for the kids and they gave me info on workshops for teens and kids that we can check out in the future. Happiness is having access to all these creative fun adventures for the kids and me. The kids even met a threatened giant freshwater lobster from Tasmania, hanging out in the festival educating the crowds on environmental issues.
Sunday morning we met a friend and her kiddos at ACMI in the city. As the story goes… ACMI is the place where my hubby and I met volunteering all those many moons ago! Ever since then we have watched plenty of films, as independent arthouse cinema is what bought us together. It was so fun to take the kids to the screen gallery, which is full of video games and many cinema icons to explore. The kids found a virtual reality game they wanted to check out and it is a game where the city of Melbourne gets taken over by a comic book and you as the superhero have to save the city. Both of the kids really enjoyed it so I decided to check it out! Man, it was insanely real with having the ability to fly where you literally felt like you were going off the ground, going higher and higher. It was intense and I had to get back down to the ground as soon as possible as I realised I was on the top of a building and afraid of heights! I finally got to a ground level and it felt so much better and the experience left me with a bit of motion sickness from how real it felt, VR has really advanced in the time since I last checked it out at a dance party in the 90s.
Today I had a booking to get my hair cut and styled at a salon in Fitzroy – one of my fave parts of the city. I found Cherry Bomb Hair as I love the way they do colour but for today I was wanting to get a restyle and bring my curls back. My hair stylist Chloe asked for pics of what I was after and then she went to work on my dry hair and gave it some life again as I have been too busy to think about spending time at the hairdresser. It was a fun day out with a surprise shopping trip to a gorgeous art gallery space with local designer knitwear and screen printed fabric, absolutely stunning! Then after shopping, I was ready for a warm bowl of vegan ramen as it was typical Melbourne weather of rain, cool, sunshine, blue skies and not so warm on this summers day. It makes me so happy to be back here, just little things like catching the train brings a smile to my face – it is so good to be home again.
poppypeach 