Most afternoons during our stays in Melbourne, we’ve still been exploring different neighborhoods this time around, just with the baby with us. While it is always enjoyable to see family and friends here, it’s also fun to be able to revisit old favorites, like Lamb on Chapel and Shandong Mama, and also try new restaurants and bakeries that have opened. It’s basically like an extension of what we do in New York — seeing new and different neighborhoods and trying new cuisines and restaurants. Most people don’t really know their own backyards, and so we actively try to do the opposite and know where we are traveling to as well as our own home base.

We’ve been telling Chris’s parents about all these new places we have visited, and they have laughed a bit, saying this is their own home but they haven’t been to these areas much. The ironic thing there is that they are quite adventurous and have literally spent their lives traveling the world, seeing new places, eating new foods, diving into totally different cultures. But when it comes to their own home base, they don’t really see much of it and say they don’t have much time to do it. In that sense, they’re not that different to the average person who doesn’t go outside of their own neighborhood or surrounding neighborhoods. But when we do bring the foods back home for them to try, maybe that will entice them to go back?