Turns out in Australia, Boxing Day (Dec 26) is like Black Friday. Shopping madness! Sale! Sale! Sale! Jean and I had intended to avoid it entirely. However... I had tried on a pair of sandals at a department store earlier in the week, but hadn't purchased them because I thought I had to be able to get them cheaper online. Turns out, no. Big footed girls should just buy the shoes when they find them in Oz. So Jean and I headed for downtown Melbourne on the biggest shopping day of the year for surgical strike shopping.
After fighting our way through the crowds on the street, we entered David Jones, which is a HUGE department store. So huge, in fact, that men and women have completely separate, 7 level stores across the street from each other in downtown Melbourne. Jean and I took the escalator up to the third floor where the women's shoes live. The sight that greeted us was a whole set of the squashy benches where people sit to try on shoes, completely covered with male significant others waiting for their dear ones to get done shoe shopping. They looked about as patient as a group of similar males would look in the US. I was surprised by how many there were... Maybe the ladies had to wait at the sporting goods store later? Or they'd already done that bit?
Anyway, just beyond them was a horde of women milling about, and single shoes covering every square inch of available space. I found a single of the pair I tried on before, not in my size, but I hopped in the queue hoping they'd have my size in back. Jean found a pair too and joined me in the line. Then left me because she saw another shoe she liked. Then I left her because I saw another shoe I liked... then we held the spot in line for a lady who liked one of the shoes we found and went to see if they had it in her size. This happened a few times. Being half-Wuerffels (my mom's side of the family), we made small talk with everyone in line. It was almost fun.
The lady directly in front of us waited 45 minutes only to discover they didn't have the style she was holding in her size. They did have mine in two sizes, and the ones Jean wanted. They let us step off to the side to try them on, which took a bit of fiddling around since basically it was just a little place where they bumped out the aisle markers. (All the dudes were taking up the benches, anyway.) At least when we were done they just took our money instead of making us wait in line again. In the end, 4 pairs of shoes for $250, including a pair of clarks and a pair of eccos. Not bad, except for fighting the crowds with a giant bag of shoes in the aftermath!
We dropped the giant bag off at my office, and then headed back through downtown to the National Gallery Victoria. As you can tell from the sidewalks, this wasn't the heart of the shopping district. Thank goodness! We walked rather than taking the tram, so we went past one building of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT - the other big university in town) and the randomly wooden side of the Melbourne Central Railway Station. And thanks to Jean, found the Melbourne equivalent of Chipotle: Guzman Y Gomez. Tasty burritos!
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