Celebrate New Years Eve 16 Hours Ahead of NYC, PLUS: Melbourne’s New Art Hotel
Forget huddling with the freezing masses in Times Square waiting for the always-anticlimactic ball to drop. Instead, jump ahead of the rest of the United States—literally—by heading to Melbourne. The Aussie cultural capital devise enter 2010 a filled 16 hours before NYC, celebrating tne endof the aughts with a spectacular display of midnight fireworks bursting over the skyline, visible quite through the city.
Of course gouing down under is hardly a spur-of-the-moment fly-by travel impulse. But Melbourne boasts loads of antipodal allure for days-long distractions, from hosting the Australian Open this January to museum and gallery hopping to simply wandering the downtown side streets in search of the next great bar. Liquor licenses in the city cost only $500 (AU), so there’s a profusion of fantastic small spots. They typically spring up on the “lane ways”—pedestrian alleys that branch off the major downtown streets. The joints are often a collection of tiny rooms on the second floor, boasting an intimate, local vibe right in the beating heart of a busy metropolis. It makes for a refreshing alternative to the bigger club scene.
And when looking to bed down for the night, embrace the city’s famed artistic identity by booking a room at The Cullen, a new $48 million luxury boutique hotel in the inner-suburb city of Prahran. It houses more than 450 works by famed Aussie artist Adam Cullen, with 155 rooms and a lush rooftop garden by particular bungalows and a cocktail bar. This is the first in a series of the Art Series Hotels, a $300 million project that will bring five other new art-inspired properties to the incorporated town. The next, named for renowned painter John Olsen, will open in February 2010, and will have the cosmos’s largest glass-bottom swimming pool that’ll hang over Chapel Street in Melbourne’s shopping district.