After a long flight from Melbourne with a middle-of-the-night layover in Singapore, I made it to Seoul! I took the KAL (Korean Airlines) Limousine Bus from Seoul’s Incheon airport to the Grand Hyatt hotel. The bus was pretty nice, as it does a loop from the airport to major hotels in Seoul, so it’s a easy, inexpensive way to efficiently get to the destination.

I was pretty wiped out when I checked in, but I managed to walk down to Full Moon where I had a beef bulgogi meal, complete with various Korean style sides.

Later, I met up with Tiffany & her family to explore Seoul a bit before having dinner at Myeongdong Kyoja, where we had amazing chicken & dumpling noodle soup along with chicken dumplings.

At first, I had the limo bus to myself, but a few others joined me at the other terminal.

Three dudes marching outside in fun clothes

Views from my hotel room

Full Moon: Beef bulgogi & sides

Me and Tiffany

These Pringles actually tasted like bolognese.

For the past four weeks, I’ve been in Australia, mostly staying in Melbourne, but also Torquay and Hobart (Tasmania). It’s been amazing! I’ve been blown away by how nice of a city is, let alone the fantastic food, coffee, & drinks available nearly everywhere.

Here are a few terms I’ve learned along the way…

And a few places I loved that have stayed on my mind…

Cafes: Proud Mary, Aunty Peg’s, Grace Cafe, Industry Beans, Rustica, Seven Seeds. (All those are great for coffee, breakfast, and lunch, with the exception of Aunty Peg’s, which just has great coffee).

Bars: Above Board, Bar Americano, Black Pearl, Byrdi.

Restaurants: Supernormal, Tonka, Chin Chin, Charcoal Lane.

Sight-seeing: St Kilda penguins at sunset (get there a half hour early to get a good spot, and walk to the end of the pier), National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), ‘Hands-On’ Street Art Experience (Airbnb – Lukas), Ian Potter museum, Royal Botanic Gardens, the Keith Haring mural in Collingswood.

Shopping: Original & Authentic Aboriginal Art, Wonderkammer.

Outside Melbourne: Anglesea Golf Club – Kangaroo tour, Great Ocean Road, Koala Cafe (100% because of the koalas nearby), the beach.

Hobart, Tasmania: Museum of New and Old Art (MONA, incredible), Pennicott Seafood Seduction boat tour (omfg), Macq01 Hotel, Sullivan’s Cove whisky.

Next stop: Seoul!

🇰🇷

Just a few blocks from where I’m staying, I happened upon a multi-block street festival that had two stages of various music & dancing, and in between a menagerie of food options. I ended up getting some chicken ‘wanton’ tacos, which were pretty tasty.

Today, Taylor & I went to Mate Fest, an international beer fest hosted by Moon Dog Brewery in Melbourne. Our friend Erik from Magpie in Seoul gave a masterclass, which was pretty fun!

Breakfast at Grace Cafe: Chilli Scrambled Eggs, with Lao gan ma chilli, pickled shiitake, enoki and szechuan crunch on toast

Taylor & me

Magpie’s Erik giving a masterclass

Moon dog had a dope analog style version of Pong

Moon dog’s crazy keg setup

A mostly random sort of day with Erik and Taylor. We ate and drank our way around Melbourne.

Soft shelled crab ‘burger’, from Proud Mary’s. (basically, they seem to call anything on a bun a ‘burger’)

Tempura green beans, from Byrdi.

Grau Projekt: an art opening that a bartender told me about, which had about 8 pieces on the wall, literal tons of salt on the floor, and maybe 9 people there. I didn’t stay long.

Nashville style hot fried chicken, from Belles. pretty tasty!

ET

I mostly had a low-key day before meeting up with Rob and Erik for a fantastic dinner at Chin Chin, then Erik & I went to Mr West for some beer.

Earlier in the day, I stopped by my artwork to discover only half of it had been painted over in its first 24 hours of life, which I was pretty happy about! (I mostly expected it to be completely gone by then.)

Mooninite, the day after

Bacon Katsu Sando, from Proud Mary’s. So f’ing good.

bowie

🎄

Green eggs and ham, from the Dr Seuss gallery

Hot Chocolate, from Hash Specialty Coffee. Epic. So bitter, so dark, so delicious.

I went on a walking tour of street art in Melbourne that I found on Airbnb. Lukas took me and another guest around to see some cool street art, pointed out various different styles, and put it all into context and the culture around the street art scene here. BUT, the highlight is that we got to make our own street art. It was awesome! I was super nervous to start, but it came out way better than I had hoped.

I chose to paint Ignignokt, a mooninite from the tv show Aqua Teen Hunger Force (ATHF). Not only is ATHF made by [adult swim] in Atlanta, but the voice actor for Ignignokt is ATHF creator Dave Willis, who went to Wake Forest and while there was Station Manager at Wake Radio (two things I also did). Also, my late friend Trey Tims worked at Adult Swim and worked on the marketing campaign that put LED-based mooninites up in 10 different US cities, most notably Boston (sigh, lol).

Mooninite

Mooninite & me

The rest of these were found in Melbourne.

A tree created with several stencils

Kasper

Kasper

This afternoon and evening, I went to St Kilda Pier in the southern part of Melbourne. Every day at sunset, a colony of penguins swims back to the rocks to sleep. You can catch a couple of them inside the rocks during the day, but the real treat is right at sunset, when they swim up to the shore and waddle up to the rocks. PENGUINS!!!

St Kilda Pier

St Kilda Pier

Penguin

Penguin

Penguin

Melbourne city lights, as seen from St Kilda Pier

I tried the New York style pizza at Shawcross, which was pretty tasty, but the downside was you couldn’t hold it up properly (too flimsy on the bottom half).

After a lot of colder, rainy days, it was gorgeous in Melbourne today. I walked a couple of miles over to the zoo, where I saw some dope animals.

Elephant

Giraffe

Wild dogs

Lion

I met up with Taylor, Maki, Sheena, & Brenda at the South Melbourne Market, where we had coffee and pastries, walked around, did some shopping, and then had a paella lunch at Simply Spanish in the market.

We stopped by their house for a bit before Taylor & I went to dinner at Supernormal, which turned out to be my best meal in Melbourne (so far at least!). We started with cocktails and the raw Kingfish with mandarin dashi, arame. It was a good start to what would continue to be a great meal. We moved on to the Crisp pork jowl & watercress salad – that pork jowl was not only crisp, but so tender it was like liquid pork. The New England lobster roll was perhaps the perfect form of a lobster roll – a lobster salad ensconced in a brioche roll with a fantastic light crunch. For the main, we had the slow-cooked Szechuan lamb with sesame bread & coriander paste. The spice was subtle and never over-powering, but the lamb was so tender and flavorful!

South Melbourne Market

Taylor & Sheena

Supernormal

Negroni

Eight

Kingfish with mandarin dashi, arame

New England lobster roll

Slow-cooked Szechuan lamb with sesame bread & coriander paste

Downstairs

Chief Wiggum