The city of Melbourne is known for their appreciation for art, food, music and celebration.  Each year an incredibly large show takes place during one week in September.  This past extravaganza took place on the 17-27, and included all aspects of life in Melbourne.  5 star hotels were booked full, not only with people traveling to the city to attend the show, but with the hundreds of vendors from around the world who were involved in this huge event.  That event was the Royal Melbourne Show held at the Grand Pavilion.  This is one of the most popular commercial venues in the city, and for that week it was filled with all sorts of products to buy, and food and wine to taste and enjoy.

This is located in downtown Melbourne close to the main boulevard and everyone in attendance was able to experience the best of the best.  The groceries and the produce available was of the highest quality of everything from dairy products to the beef industry, wine, herbs, and fruits and vegetables.  Cooking demonstrations were given by some of the top chefs in the world, and of course samples were given out, making everyone in the theater very happy to say the least.  And that’s not all, there was an exhibit on Home and Living that offered suggestions to people on subjects such as home improvement ideas, gardening tools and advice, crafts, and any other gadget one would use around the house.  This was a great exhibit for anyone who loves do it yourself home repairs and remodeling.

The Royal Champion dog show took place and there were vendors selling anything in the world one may wish to buy their pets.  The market show really had it all, from centers just for children, to book vendors and those selling herbs for Chinese healing techniques.  The arts and crafts exhibits at the Art, Craft and Cookery pavilion is one of the longest running participants in the Royal Melbourne show, participating for more the one hundred years.  Here one could find not only art to buy, but classes to take and supplies to purchase.  This is one of the largest, all encompassing trade shows in the world, and is well worth making a trip to Melbourne each September.

The Royal Melbourne Show is a post from: DJ Trava

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2. A Past Life in Melbourne
3. Drumming through Melbourne

The company I work for arranged for my department to fly to Australia and stay at one of the top Melbourne hotels where we will participate in a drumming experience for team building and leadership training. There are 27 people in my department, that’s quite an expense for our company to make us learn how to drum. We were all laughing when we got the memo, but, any chance to go to Melbourne, Australia, even if it is with all my fellow co-workers, sounded good to me.

When we all assembled at a conference room in the hotel, I had no idea what to expect. The facilitators put us at ease right away and told us that by drumming together has been scientifically proven to help boost our immune system, relieve stress and is an unbeatable ice-breaker because it requires team work and it will motivate, inspire, empower and unify our whole department. Of course they knew what our first question was, ‘how will drumming do this?’ and they were prepared with an answer: they told us to consider the pure and simple musical elements which are the building blocks of music, drumming and percussion. Those elements are rhythm and harmony, melody and pitch. But, they also included timbre into the mix which is more a dynamic rather than an element.

They continued to explain that the elements and timbre have the potential for promoting and inducing relaxation, peace, calmness, energy and rejuvenation. All are a part of healing. The very elements and dynamics of percussion and music have been used the world over to induce healing. The healing does not refer to the healing of bleeding skin, or other physical traumas, though it may help with how quickly these ailments heal. Rather, the healing refers to developing a greater sense of well being. They told us that whatever state a person is in, that combining the elements of music and the dynamics of percussion, will only increase the sense of well being and relaxation, so then it can be said that a healing has occurred. So, the art of drumming is an ideal healing art.

But, we had no idea what this had to do with building up are team. They handed us our drums and told us that by the end of the day, we should have created a piece of music, all percussion, that we would be proud to play at any symphony house. I’ve never had so much fun in my life. My whole department, every single person all worked so well together and we even found out that some of our team mates were very talented drummers! We worked through the whole day, not even noticing the time, we enjoyed everyones input (drumming) and tried to figure out how to incorporate everyones own sense of rhythm into our creation, our symphony of percussions. When we got to play our piece in front of the facilitators, we were all beaming with smiles and totally paying attention to all the nuances and changes in rhythms anyone brought into the piece. We all just flowed with the beat. When it was over, I noticed a few of my team mates were crying. From that day on, I knew my department now had the means to work in harmony together.

Drumming through Melbourne is a post from: DJ Trava

Related posts:

1. The Royal Melbourne Show
2. Healing Plants of South Africa
3. A Past Life in Melbourne