Today I took a trip to Clayton. It is one of the suburbs on the edge of Zone 1, and one of the Monash University campuses is there.The day started pretty smoothly, or so I thought (though it was a chilly 10 degrees at 9:30 am). I left the house and 2 mins later a tram arrived and whisked me off to South Yarra Station, and upon checking the info board, the train I was supposed to take was arriving in 1 minute. Excellent. So I hopped on the train feeling rather pleased with myself. About 20 mins later I decided to take a look at the train route map just to check how many stops more till my destination, only to realize in horror that I was on the WRONG LINE. Even though I had it all in my head since the night before which line I was supposed to take, I still made that silly and time-consuming mistake. What was I to do but to get off at the next stop (Middle Brighton, one more stop to Brighton Beach) and wait for the next train back to South Yarra, which happens to be an interchange station. Well, after eventually getting on the right train, I got off at Huntingdale station which is the last station in Zone 1, and crossing the road to the bus stop to take the 630 to the Monash bus loop, as I was instructed. I was an hour late. On the bus, it started raining. Heavily. Luckily there were shelters when I arrived at Monash campus, where I waited for rayz. The Monash bus loop is called that because it is just a mini bus terminal where the all the bus stops are arranged around a loop of road. Just as suddenly as the rain came, it was gone by the time my friend arrived. He took me on a quick tour of the Monash campus, as I've never been there before, and I was surprised at how well equipped their student center building was, with a cafeteria, travel agency, a computer and software outlet, and even a cinema and a Commonwealth Bank branch, not just ATM machines. The main RMIT buildings in the city have some of these amenities too (but not a cinema, though they have several lecture halls and auditoriums around), but not as big and centralized as this. Rayz also showed me the Robert Menzies Building, where the Monash shooting and unfortunate death of 2 students happened around this time last year. No, I didn't go up to the 6th floor where the aforementioned incident happened. As we were walking back to his place, it started raining again, along with strong, gusty wind. So windy that it was impossible to use an umbrella without getting blown away. We chilled out a bit at his place a bit, fiddling with his computer and listening to his rather eclectic music collection (like mine, but different). Every time we wanted to go out for lunch, it would start raining. It was such typical Melbourne weather, alternating between rain and shine every 5 minutes. So in the end we just got all ready, jackets and all, and the second it stopped, we dashed out of the house. Just as we got to the row of shops where we were having lunch, it absolutely POURED! Just as well we went out when we did. The restaurant was a small shop, quaintly named "The Makan Place". It's a Malay restaurant run by Singaporeans, and I had nasi lemak, though they ran out of the actual nasi lemak itself, so i had it with normal white rice. Not bad, I must say. The sambal was pretty good. As we were having lunch, the downpour outside turned into *hail*!! By the time we were done with lunch, the rain had stopped and the sun was back out again, though still windy when we made our way to the bus stop to go back to Huntingdale Station to catch a train back.