I've never been south of the Equator either, but...it will be late winter/early spring there, right? Is it cold in Melbourne in September? Stay warm.

And watch the sun rise in the northeast and set in the northwest. Please report back if you find this disorienting. I suspect I would feel turned inside-out...if I noticed it at all!

1: Because it took three months for me to give in and see the doctor 30 seconds for a diagnosis and another fifteen minutes before I stopped arguing with him and tried my ventolin.

And now I don't cough... Courtesy of a battery of inhalers.

Climate stats
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/averages/tables/cw_086071.shtml

And the thing about the sun the threw me (when I was in the UK) wasn't the compass direction, but the fact it moves the _wrong way_.

Museums and Galleries: We have many, clustered around Flinders Street Station. From a tech/pop culture perspective, the most interesting is the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. There will be a major Tim Burton retrospective, among other things, while you are in town. But there's also the NGV which usually puts on a cracker Winter Exhibition as well. Dali this year; European masters next year. Or hop onto a number 86 tram and go to Smith Street, Collingwood, for more experimental and avant garde stuff by the locals.

Food: We are the food capital of Australia; especially try Vietnamese in Richmond, Italian in Lygon Street, Chinese in chinatown (I recommend the Post Mao cafe, unless you have big bucks, in which case hit Flower Drum), MoVida for tapas - book in advance - Grossi Florentino or Ezard for big, expensive luxury. Or there's the Colonial Tramcar Restaurant - dinner on a tram. Or come to my place for a lamb roast. We also have a thriving pub/music scene but the venues in the CBD are a bit commercial for my tastes. YMMV.

Scenery: I'm biased, but Melbourne is beautiful. It was built on Gold Rush money, so it has amazing 19th century architecture and a long standing tradition of public art. The CBD is a maze of High Victorian arcades with funky little shops in them, and it's surrounded by planned gardens, the loveliest of which are the Botanical gardens. Just walk around, or hop on a Tram (the maroon city-circle ones are free) and take pictures.

Getting out of town: the Yarra Valley is a great day trip - scenery, wineries and if you go past the wineries, Healesville, home to Healesville Sanctuary, where you can get up close and personal with the local fauna. Pat a wombat today! It's about 1.5 hours out of the CBD. Has the Melbourne Zoo beat, unless you want to see the butterfly enclosure. Although the Zoo is easier to get to if you won't have a car. Other possible day trips: the Mount Dandenong Tourist Road, which takes you into the bush and isn't likely to be on fire at that time of year; great day-walks and parks. Mornington Peninsula: Intensely cold in winter, but lovely, more wineries and ocean views, as well as a robust antiques industry. Lots of crafts and galleries too.

Email me - tell me what you like and I'll hone my suggestions.

Well, that's what I plan to do if I ever make it to the Southern Hemisphere. Also, have a bite of a Vegemite sandwich, apparently.

But just one bite. It's sufficient for a lifetime, believe me.

Feel better, Patricio. I've never been to Melbourne but I have a couple of buddies who live/ have lived thereabouts... I'll ask them what the must-do/ sees are, and get back to you if I hear of anything good.

Thanks for various Melbourne suggestions. I'm receptive to the idea that it's a terrific city; my assistant Liz Gorinsky returned from a trip there a year or so ago pronouncing it to be the coolest city in the world.

Also, I like Vegemite -- and Marmite -- and you can't fool me with the old wheeze about how you have to make sure to spread a thick enough layer of it onto your toast.

I don't find anything consciously disorienting about the position of the sun when I move from one hemisphere to the other, but it sure does mess up my sense of direction.

Fitzroy district in Melbourne is a fine place to spend afternoon. Good bakeries.

Somewhere a few years back, I read this great article in Science News, that I now cannot find. It was about the truly stunning improvements in immune system response with the addition of Vitamin D. It was only with cells in test tubes, various growing things in petri dishes, and very small animals independent of petri dishes. But the results were so intense, I started taking Vitamin D regularly. I didn't want to wait for ten years of lab testing when I could test myself right now. (For those who say "sunlight," I respond "sunscreen!")

I have been taking 400 to 800mg mostly every day since. More when I'm more stressed than normal, or exposed to something icky. I'll get really tired for a few days after the appropriate incubation period, or maybe a little congested for a day or two. But I used to get ten days to two weeks of ghods-awful shoot-me nasties, and a cough that went on for-ev-er, unless I lived with the VitaminC bottle, which I sometimes (often) didn't. I don't get those any more. Haven't for a couple of years now.

The really nice thing about the VitD treatment is I only have to chase down my housemates once a day, rather than far more often with the VitC treatment. And yes, it will help even after you have the nasties.

Mite-y adepts?

Cool.

Yes. (By my standards, anyway.)

Melbourne is famous for having "four seasons in one day": regardless of the weather when you look out the window in the morning, be prepared for variety.

And it is my experience that when changing hemispheres you will indeed get 180 degrees disoriented. I recommend bringing a cheap compass. (Or an iPhone. There's an app that claims to give compass-like features even in the absence of a digital compass, with the aid of sunlight, shadow direction, and your finger as a gnomon. I'm not too sure as to how good its maths is, though.)

Before you go, Google "hook turn". If you're planning on driving while in Oz, don't attempt a hook turn without study first. Similarly, roundabouts are a bit scary the first time you drive one (especially the two-lane ones).

Also be aware that "pavement" has the opposite meaning: in the US it means "road surface"; in Australia it means "footpath".

You do get lorikeets in Melbourne, if not quite at the density that you see further north. Coral, on the other hand, not.

You probably already knew this, but Au Contraire, the New Zealand national SF convention, is being held in Wellington the weekend before Aussiecon -- a deliberate move to attract foreign fans who for once will be in the right hemisphere. I for one intend to do both cons ...

Pedestrian crossings are to help the car drivers locate pedestrians to run over. If you're driving try to stay near pedestrian crossings so the other drivers go for the pedestrians instead of you.

Dropbears don't come into the city (other than the main park and even then only at night).

They're not kidding about four seasons in a day. There will probably be more.

I don't know if they have toast racks in Australia. I hope not, on general principles.

Anyway, the point is that people who like marmite spead a thin layer on hot toast, not a thick layer on cold toast. Personally, I'd no more put marmite on toast than I'd put soy sauce on toast -- it's a cooking ingredient.

Doug's link at #33 sums it up quite nicely. Mean minimum temperature for September: 7.9 degrees Celsius. 46.2 Fahreneit. (Limit the results to 1980-2010 and that jumps up to 9.2/48.6) If you've survived a winter anywhere snow happens, you will laugh at what Melbournians call cold.

vian's note on food needs expansion but that could lead to silliness. There isn't much that you can't get somewhere in Melbourne. We haven't been doing the cultural melting pot for as long as, say, New York, but we've put a lot of effort into it. I'll add one restaurant to that list: Lemon Bistro mostly serves a standard Thai/Malay restaurant menu - good pad thais and laksas - but they also play with local ingredients. Thai red curry with kangaroo or a ginger and basil stir fry of crocodile are well worth trying. You should try kangaroo in some form. Get a real taste of Australia.

Tom @ 24 is pretty much right. We don't really do awesome in Melbourne, we just do a steady, constant laid back kind of cool.

I assume that Clark Fries was using some variation of this to get directions near the end of Podkayne of Mars, with the additional help of polarized spectacles.

If memory (from Aussiecon[One]) serves, it's interesting that Ethnic Cuisine (including run-of-the-mill Chinese, and Pommy/British) is just slightly *different* from either U.S. or on-site versions. Good/mediocre/bad in just about the same proportions as anywhere, but not quite the same flavors & textures.

And you'll find other people and yourself saying "pardon me" a lot when you're walking along crowded city sidewalks, until you've adjusted to the fact that one walks to the left rather than the right to avoid collisions.

Even in the coldest month (July) it doesn't typically get cold enough for me to wear anything heavier than a sweatshirt. But it never really gets beastly hot, either.

The Mel-born must find places like New York, where it gets up to 35C with some regularity, really horrifying. Still more places like where I grew up, where winter temperatures of -29C are not unheard of, even in the daytime.

Martin, #39: I know about the dropbears already (remind me to warn you about the dangers posed in Arizona by jackalopes), but if "Pedestrian crossings are to help the car drivers locate pedestrians to run over" is more than just the usual tendency of locals to assert that their drivers are the worst anywhere, then boo hiss. I'm rapidly becoming convinced that the relative privilege of humans-without-automobiles versus humans-in-automobiles is a fundamental index of civilization.

The southern-hemisphere sun didn't affect my sense of direction after the second day, but it did funny things to my sense of time, because moving from right to left instead of left to right meant it was always in an unexpected part of the sky.

Sometimes slightly confused about where I was supposed to drive the car, but that's normal :-).

Still don't have the photos from that trip up on my web page, and it's been, hmmm, 27 years or some such. I guess I'm behind. (Wasn't for one of the Aussiecons, it was a business trip. Either 1983 or 1984, don't now remember.)

I liked both countries a lot, and Auckland, and Melbourne, and Sidney. I doubt they've ruined them since :-).

I knew it was a bad idea to put in faves - the simple truth is you can't throw a stone without hitting somewhere fabulous to eat in Melbourne. Last night: Caboose in Fed Square; they do their own charcuterie as an entree (appertizer) platter, and a mains (US English: entree - why do you folks call something 1/3 of the way though the meal the entry?) menu which looks really unimaginative (steaks and pasta and the like) but is incredibly well executed.

I'll also third the notion that we don't do awesome, but we exude a consistent cool. We've also been named a city of literary excellence - if you are in town for a while, you could do worse than settle in for some pub poetry.

I lived in Madison, Wisconsin for two years, and have learned that temperature isn't the only thing which governs cold. Melbourne gets wet, freezing winds straight from the Antarctic which gnaw the bones in a way that the dry crisp cold of Madison just doesn't. People don't die of exposure over there while waiting for buses, but don't let the temperature fool you - it can often feel colder than you expect, particularly on a blustery day.

I lived in Madison, Wisconsin for two years, and have learned that temperature isn't the only thing which governs cold. Melbourne gets wet, freezing winds straight from the Antarctic which gnaw the bones in a way that the dry crisp cold of Madison just doesn't. People don't die of exposure over here while waiting for buses, but don't let the temperature fool you - it can often feel colder than you expect, particularly on a blustery day.

@6, @17 - Actually, even if the Coriolis effect wasn't so small as to be negligible, you wouldn't be able to find that out from an Australian toilet.

One of the things I found really hard to get used to in countries like the US is that you have toilets which swirl and then drain.

They don't work like that here. Toilets have less water to start with, and then you get a kind of reverse fountain effect when you flush to clean everything up.

One of our biggest surprises in Australia, at least in the Sydney and Melbourne areas, is that coffee and wine are good everywhere, but tea and beer are not particularly special. Not what I expected.

I am hoping to convince wifey to let me skive off for a couple of days from Brisbane to go. I've always wanted to attend a worldcon but I was too young for the first two and unavailable for the third. This might just be the year to do it!

d

On a different note, Aussiecon4 will be my first Worldcon experience, so for the first time I have the opportunity to nominate and vote at the Hugos. I'm finding the prospect somewhat daunting. Is there an easy way to determine if a story is a short story, novelette or novella? Not all publications provide that information.

Lenore Jones, #56: "One of our biggest surprises in Australia, at least in the Sydney and Melbourne areas, is that coffee and wine are good everywhere, but tea and beer are not particularly special. Not what I expected."

Well, the wine and beer stand to reason, at least based on the export stuff I've come across -- Australian wine is terrific, whereas (to my taste, anyway) their major-label beers are pretty forgettable. Of course, I'm willing to believe that they have a thriving microbrewery scene that doesn't export much to the US.

Furthermore, given that Italian is the commonest non-Anglosphere ancestry in modern Australia, the good coffee isn't too surprising, either.

That is all.

That's why we export them. We keep the good stuff for ourselves. The major label stuff is generally awful and I wish it was more forgettable.

vian @ 62: I'll see your Beez Neez and raise you a six pack of Little Creatures Bright Ale.

I grew up in Melbourne, it took me many years to get out of the habit of carrying a coat, even on a hot day. The temperature can drop 40 degrees F in an
hour or so. It is called a "cool change".

"Welcome to Melbourne. Is this your first time here?"

* Celsius. 107.6 Fahrenheit.

And seconding everyone else's comments about the weather. It really is that changeable.

You probably won't be able to get to a footy match, because finals tickets are hard to get. Try, though. The MCG is worth it.

@ErrolC #10 Unfortunately, it's nearly impossible to get tickets to any of the final rounds of the AFL season unless you're a club member *and* you've signed up for a package that gives you the right to buy some. -- Signed, a proud member of the St Kilda Saints, who couldn't get a ticket to the final rounds last year...