Over the weekend, Melbourne city closed off all its roads downtown and hosted an all night arts festival. It began Saturday evening at 7:00pm and lasted until Sunday morning at 7:00am. The event highlighted art, light installations, music and performances – all exhibited throughout the streets of Melbourne.
Several people advised us that the largest crowds would be out earlier making it almost impossible to get around. The bulk of the city comes out for this event and feels a bit like a massive block party. With this in mind, we set a plan with a couple mates to trek out after midnight. Admittedly, this was quite a feat – we are now old and starting a night out at midnight is not something we looked forward to doing.
Thankfully, our friends had worked out a route across the entire city so we could get a glimpse of several exhibits in an orderly fashion. We actually did quite well staying out until about 4:00am when we all agreed that we had sufficiently experienced what the festival had to offer.
The Alice in Wonderland theme came up more than once and the light projections on many of the city buildings were impressive. We were definitely pleased about our decision to venture out later in the night as the crowds died down and made the exploration much more manageable. Undoubtedly, a fair number of attendees were just out to be out partying but you really have to give credit to a city that celebrates arts to this magnitude and the organization it takes to put on such a huge event.
Disclaimer: a couple of the pics were borrowed from online sources to show how big the crowds were earlier in the evening.
Coming up this week… Ben’s parents are visiting! They will be touching down on Friday morning so there will be lots of family posting to look forward to!