thatseriousgirl: Melbourne Trip!

I went to a conference in Melbourne with Z., L., and H.,! We stayed in the same room with an ensuite between us that we left open so we could talk all night. The first night there we stayed up until 2am chatting and had to drink a lot of coffee to make up for it. The first night that we got there, we decided to get something to eat and wandered up and down the streets of Melbourne to find somewhere to eat.

We decided to pick G2 Korean BBQ because it was one of the few places open. We got this free soju cocktail because we had to move tables to accommodate a large table. It was a peach soju drink and was quite sweet and tasty!

Free dranks

I picked the cheese ddeokbokki, as you know one of my absolute favourite Korean dishes. This was the best rendition of it I've ever had, the dish cost about $20 but was absolutely huge. There were layers and layers of stretchy mozzarella cheese that remained stretchy until the end. There were perfectly delicious rice cakes and fish cakes throughout the dish.

Bargain!

We got the soldier stew with sausage and spam! It had lots of pork belly chunks, zucchini, onion, soft togy, mushroom, enoki mushrooms, carrot, cabbage, spam, sausage pieces and bits of kimchi. It was a mildly spicy soup with lots of interesting bits to fish out and eat. All of us girls had a hearty discussion about our love for Spam, Z., is from the Phillipines, H., is from South Korea and L., is from Taiwan, all our countries had huge military presences from the US at one stage or another. Spam was a big deal and status symbol in our countries, plus tasty to boot. I don't get most peoples reluctance to eat it, its a dodgy weird comfort food for me.

Spam hotpot, got it.

We got the Korean fried chicken, it was delicious! Crunchy pieces of fried chicken with a sweet and spicy sauce, covered in green onion and toasted sesame seeds. We didn't finish this and ended up bringing home about half of it for leftovers. I ate it the next day as my breakfast.

Too much food!

On our way back to the hotel, we decided we needed tea to soothe our full bellies. We saw this Asian grocery store called Tokyo Hometown, it had pretty much EVERYTHING you could think of. It was about the size of a regular Coles/Woolworths and I've never seen so much variety in Asian food. There was an entire aisle dedicated to green tea flavoured sweets. Every day we stopped by this shop for snacks, if you're in Melbourne and are Asian, stop by this place and marvel.

Amazingggggg

H., got this buckwheat tea for us to drink and while the taste is nothing particular, the smell is amazing, kind of a toasty bread/rice grain kind of smell. It reminds me of genmaicha without the green tea aspect. It brews up a bright yellow tea, like fluorescent yellow.

Delicious!

The next night we caught up with our ex-work colleagues who moved down to Melbourne, C., and Kateo! Gill., was also with us as she had traveled down separately for the conference. We wandered around the CBD for a bit before I decided that we should head into Chinatown and into this place called Shanghai Street for dinner. It looked really packed and had a queue out the door, we got seated straight away because we had a group of seven.

I went a bit nuts ordering food but H., reined me in as usual. The first dish we got was this seafood combination fried rice full of carrots, peas, plump prawns, seafood sticks and lovely individual grains of rice. It disappeared in a few minutes once everyone had scooped up a bowl, in hindsight I should have been allowed to order a second plate H.,!

Oh fried rice <3

This was our only concession to vegetables, garlic stir fried kai lan! It got passed around a lot but everyone enjoyed its slight bitterness and crunch.

Kai lan for fav Asian veggie

This was the pork xiao long bao, L., and I both thought this was a good rendition of the dish with a large serving size, juicy pork mince filling, ample soup inside and gorgeous pleating. It was a lot of fun teaching Kateo, C., and Gill how to eat these as they were surprised by the soup inside.

Yummy

This was the chicken dumpling with hot chili oil and peanut sauce, this was Kateo's choice from memory and it was an absolute cracker. It was scorching hot but addictive in its spiciness, we ended up scooping up all the sauce to use on our fried rice. Chili oil, peanut butter dumplings is an amazing combination and I cannot recommend it highly enough, if you ever see it on a menu, get it!

Delicious

We got fried dumplings. They were very pale but uniformly super crunchy, we had a sneaking suspicion that they were dumped in a deep fryer to get that crunch. I wish the colour was better but what can you do!

Crunchy dumplings are delicious

We got these sweet chilli prawns but we were super surprised when they came out as KING prawns in a serve of four. They were huge, about the size of your palm, there was no clear way that we could split it between the seven of us. So we split prawns into two but shared the sauce, THAT SAUCE, it was perfect on rice! We should've saved the rice for that sauce! Sweet, spicy, garlicky, thick and clinging to our spoons, we scraped the plate clean and Z., confessed that if we weren't in a restaurant she would've licked the plate clean.

Looks like vomit though

This is the half roasted duck, we thought it would be a Peking style/roasted duck, so we were surprised when it was this brine soaked, crispy dry duck. It was intensely salty and crunchy, like eat all the bones crunchy. It wasn't a hit at our table but I did eat most of it myself, mostly because I absolutely adore duck.

Dubious purchase

This is what the sign looks like! I find social media link ins for restaurants in Melbourne are a lot better than in Brisbane for some reason.

Dumplingsss

We wanted to sit around and talk shit while having drinks or dessert and I had seen the perfect place on my travels! To N2 Gelato Bar! I think it was as much the flavours as the theatre of having freshly made nitrogen gelato that enticed us there. Also Terumo syringes of syrup for only $1! Hahaha, a taste of work!

This is L.,'s apple cider gelato with strawberry syringe! We probably should have all gotten much smaller sizes because none of us finished our portions.

Looks great!

This was the super popular Ferro Rocher sundae, hazelnut gelato, Nutella, hazelnut pieces, chocolate shot, vanilla wafers and one of those wafer sticks! I think nearly everyone got one of these.