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The kids and I took the tram to the State Library of Victoria one afternoon and had a great time riding the tram and exploring a gorgeous library!
Near the elevators, we saw some historical photos. We realize now that we have no idea who the people are as we were too busy taking pictures! 🙂
Nonetheless, in the two separate pictures below, we have a puzzle/song for you!
4 of these guys belong together; 4 of these guys are kind of the same, but 1 of these guys just doesn’t belong here. Now it’s time to play our game. It’s time to play our game! 😉 Of course our little picture game is a play on the old Sesame Street classic!
In case you didn’t figure it out, the smiling gentleman in each picture is L! 🙂
We’d seen video footage of the beautiful dome in a travel video about Melbourne, so we were looking forward to seeing it in person! It’s located in the La Trobe Reading Room.
We spent some time admiring the room and then sat down at some desks to do some drawing. The kids were particularly interested in the “pop-up” desks that functioned as small drafting tables. 🙂
There are several galleries with both permanent and temporary exhibitions. We were interested in finding and having a look at a miniature library created by David Bryce and Son (c. 1895). The tiny bookcase contains twelve miniature reference books, including religious texts, dictionaries (including a French/English one), and a volume of poetry. Those are G and L’s fingers in the picture to give some perspective!
This beautiful staircase goes up to one of the dome room balconies but isn’t available for public use.
Here’s L posing like one of the statues.
As we made our way up to the high floors, we had different views of the dome and reading room. Can you see the section below where people are playing chess?
There was an absolutely stunning stained glass window of Shakespeare on the 6th floor.
Standing in front of the entrance to the library. We found out later that the statue behind the kids is of Redmond Barry (1813-1880), who was a judge on the Supreme Court of Victoria and instrumental in the development of the State Library of Victoria.
On our way to and from the library, we passed by the wonderful smell of roasted, sugary nuts and overheard the people working at the Chooh La La cart speaking French. We had to stop. 🙂 We spoke with them in French, they offered us a sample, and we bought a small bag of the deliciously sweet and toasty almonds! They also were super nice about having a picture taken with G and L. It’s so fun to continue to be able to practice our French language skills around the world!
While I enjoyed people watching on the tram ride back to our apartment, G and L enjoyed playing a game on G’s tablet.
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