White Night Wonder

The White Night Festival had a lot to live up to last night. Between the advertising and word of mouth, everyone thought it was going to be a history making event. And it was, but maybe not for the reasons we were all hoping for. To me White Night was meant to be a cultural celebration of music, art, cinema, light and theatre but it seemed to turn into one massive booze-filled street party. I think the City massively underestimated how many people were going to come in for this event. 

9pm: We went to the Melbourne Museum first and they were completely underprepared for how many people were attending. We had to wait 20mins just to get in and then we couldn't do any of the advertised activities because of the sheer amount of people. We still had fun because it's fairly impossible not to enjoy the museum. Plus Fran was with us and she'd never been to the museum so we got to show her around. 

11pm: After the museum, we walked back to Fed Square because we couldn't get on a tram, only to find that there were about 300,000 people in the city. This was a bit of a shock and our first instincts were to run and hide! We ended up at Little Peninsula for an hour and a half hiding and waiting for the crowds to thin. 

1am: On our way back to the festivities, we came across the Jazz in Degraves Street which was amazing. The guys were so talented and it was definitely one of the highlights of the night and one of the few events we actually got to see. 

2am: The projections and the artwork were very beautiful and awe-inspiring, but it was hard to get close when you were dodging 300,000 people. We then headed down the river to watch what was probably the best thing I saw all night, and that was a massive water fountain/projections display in the middle of the Yarra River. The photos I took really didn't do it justice but it was pretty to see so that's all that matters to me. We didn't get to see any of the ACMI cinema events because you couldn't get near ACMI, which was disappointing. 

3am: We spent the rest of the night hiding out at The Arts Centre and had a great night chatting and drinking coffee there. Overall the night was a lot of fun, but there were way too many people. If you actually managed to read this far into my rant congratulations, and if you went to White Night, did you enjoy it? I know I hope it happens again, but I think there needs to be some changes. But this is just one person's opinion. You might think differently, and that's totally fine.

I also want to say a massive thank you to all the police, security guards, traffic management professionals and all other staff who helped keep everyone as safe as possible last night. I was very impressed with how to authorities handled that amount of people. 

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