What's So Great About Melbourne Anyway?

Because of the big change that will happening in 4 months, I've been doing heaps of research online as far as realtors, the costs of furnishing an apartment, details on the migration process, wholesale shopping clubs - all in Melbourne of course. I've joined two Yahoo! groups for Americans in Australia and Melbourne. On one of them I found a post that describes what makes Melbourne such a great place to live, plus I added a few of my own:

• The people are generally smarter and friendlier than Americans
• There is more global awareness in Australia than in America
• The variety of restaurants is fantastic: Italian, Greek, Indonesian, Japanese, Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, Colombian and heaps of vegetarian restaurants. Any type of Asian food you can imagine, you can find it.
• Public transport is superb - online, efficient, clean and tourist friendly
• The cafe and sidewalk cafe culture is huge, take Degraves Street as an example
• Although winter is nothing to brag about, the fact that it doesn't get cold enough for snow
• It has a "beach" just a tram ride away from the city centre, it's actually a bay, but it's got sand, it's clean and it's in a great beachside suburb called St. Kilda - home to the St. Kilda Festival each February
• Safety! You can walk around the city at all hours and not have to fret for your safety
• Melbourne Central Shopping Centre, the biggest inner-city shopping centre with at least 4 floors of shopping and food. The Metlink actually has as major stop in it's basement.

Of course there are downsides, like expensive books, DVDs and CDs and Australia is far from everything, meaning you will pay around at least 1K to get anywhere besides New Zealand. I'm sure there are more, but the positives by far outweight the negatives.

So basically what I'm trying to say here is that I think Melbourne is a better place to live compared to any other place I've lived so far (that includes Madrid and that definitely includes Boston).

After all, it's not Edenistic utopia we're talking about here...