and taught me how to find the half-hidden secret life of Melbourne.Appropriately enough, since we met in Paris, this picture's taken in the very French Café au Soleil. (No soleil yesterday but nobody's complaining - we've now had two days of desperately needed rain!) The chap in the suspenders is half of the nice French couple who own this place, and he's recently figured out how to get radio direct from France (Nos-tal-gie). The café's in a tributary to the Royal Arcade (Melbourne's oldest) which people usually overlook - but of course that only makes it more of a find!
You can't quite tell from this photo, but this particular arcade - it was just a laneway until glassed over in the 1930s - really feels like one the oldest of the Parisian passages. Each glass-fronted shop is two-storeyed with a tightly coiled spiral staircase, and only a few meters deep. Opposite the Café au Soleil is a cobbler who's been fixing shoes in this spot for forty years, and has the old signs and furnishings to prove it. Sometimes Melbourne really feels like an Old World city!
