Easter Weekend

G’day everybody!

As some of you know, last Sunday Riley, the BF, flew in to visit me in Australia. Unfortunately due to my field trip being in the middle of NOWHERE (10 hours traveling distance to Sydney or Canberra) I couldn’t meet him at the airport. And due to me now knowing that there are two bus companies here Greyhound AND Murray’s, he had to wait at the airport for four to five hours, then take a bust to get to Canberra. Very sad, but then I had Monday off so we were able to see parliament and the national portrait gallery. The parliament building is fairly new, and I love the inside, but on the outside the nicest thing I can say about it is that it is a huge contribution to the growing number of odd modern buildings in the world. My favorite anecdote is that when the bell rings for voting time, every member has 4 minutes to get to the voting room or they can’t get in. They figured out this limit by finding the oldest member, putting him in the far corner of the building, and timing him walking to the room. It took him 3 and a half minutes so they just rounded it to four. The national portrait gallery was also cool because it had paintings of all of the major political figures in Australia over the past few years, and I even sort of recognized some of their names.

Tuesday I was a slacker and skipped class, but I went to crew in the morning and it was very pretty.


We had a good breakfast and cooked our own dinner, (notes for travelers iced coffee and iced chocolate mean coffee and chocolate floats, not coffee poured over ice; aussies share the European aversion to ice apparently) Then we went to play Frisbee with my summer league; it was the last week so we got dominoes pizza (which is actually worse here) and then I added on to one team and riley added on to the other and we played for first place. I think my team won in universe point, no thanks to me (I had no cleats and the sprinklers came on halfway through the game) and I got a chocolate bunny for the prize.

Wednesday and thursday were boring, the only things of note were Riley’s fixing of our wireless internet, YAY! I now can blog comfortably form my bed and nor fro the kitchen counter far from any power outlet, table, or chair. And he showed my how to make my laptop power cable double for our secondhand dvd player, which came sans remote and power cable. Hooray for non art majors that can fix things!

On Thursday, Riley rented a car and we drove down to the southeast coast. It was a nice drive except Australian radio sucks and I forgot my cds, and it started to rain when we got into town and the road google maps told us to take was closed. When we finally made it to the place I had booked, it was storming and we had to drive up this steep dark driveway in the middle of nowhere. (by the way, it was incredibly sunny and hot, nineties, the whole time we were in Canberra, but as soon as we drove to the coast it stormed all over the country)

Imagine driving up this, in the dark, in a storm

The place seemed empty except for the reception guy, an older Austrian man dressed in a flannel shirt and named Herbert. It was a charming spa/ B&B type place in the end, but in the storm, at the time, I thought we were walking into a psycho type situation. Then before he showed us the room we met his granddaughter, who had come for a sleepover and as we walked to the room we saw them playing monopoly, so cute!

It was still rainy and cold but we managed a hike along a cloudy beach and a small trail.

Bingi Bingi Point, very pretty, squishy sand, kind of cold

The trail itself was stressful because we kept almost walking into huge spiderwebs. These spiders were crazy, they weave webs across entire trails above head height. We got lost because the trail ended at the end of the park, on a country road, in a neighborhood. I have no sense of direction, and we hadn't gotten a trail map because it was a small 'walk' like trail that I honestly thought was a loop and we really didn't want to backtrack through the spider trail. To be fair we would have gotten back eventually the way we were walking, but a nice ranger gave us a ride to our car. In the end, it was cold, and there were spiders, so we packed up early and decided to go to dinner.

Herbert got us in to a nice seafood place and our table was on a pier on the water, very nice. When we got back, we asked him if we could borrow a dvd and ended up with choices that ranged from anger management to Black Stallion II. We watched part of Moulin Rouge before I got sleepy, and I hate to say this but I did not get the appeal. Maybe it’s that I don’t like Nicole Kidman but I loved the music, loved the colors, couldn’t make myself love the movie, oh well.

We drove to Sydney on Saturday, at which point it started to get a little sunny, go figure. It was a long drive on a two lane highway, and we ended up being pressed for time and not stopping for lunch and then not being able to find the Hertz in Sydney. When we finally did find it, there were no public bathrooms in it, of course, after driving for three hours. Finally we just went to the bar next door and bought beers and recollected ourselves. The Ladies was, of course, down a steep flight of stairs and had another little surprise step under the door that I tripped on going in AND out. I can’t even imagine what drunk women think of it.

We took a cab to the hotel, which was awesome because it was right next to this old post office building with a clock tower and a short walk to the bay.

The post office building was really pretty, our
hotel was a modern attachment to it

Sydney harbor is just as impressive as they say!

Having missed lunch, we immediately went out for a 4 pm lunch. We ended up getting burgers at a little seafood place and they were AMAZING. They were loosely packed and tender and seasoned like seafood and I am getting hungry just describing them. They are second only to Mervs in my heart as the perfect cheeseburger.

We also did some souvenir shopping and I scoped out the crocodile Dundee hat situation, I am seriously considering one as my field trips are very sunny and my neck is quite burnable.

The main thing we ended up doing in Sydney though, was going to the zoo. I heard that the ferry ride there was scenic, so we went for it.

Poor Riley, I took his picture in the sun. We scrambled to get these choice seats
at the front of the boat, and then the boat went backwards the whole way.

We moved to the side of the boat here, much better on the eyes

It ended up being awesome because the zoo is on a hill and you take cable cars (gondolas in aussie speak) up to the top so we got a great air view of the harbor. We also rode it with a british family and an adorable little boy who kept pointing out all of the significant landmarks and saying he didn't want his sunglasses yet.

Us at the zoo, pictures with koalas were $20 so we settled for a
self-timer and the harbor in the background

We also got to see all of the aussie animals we failed to see on our hike, echidna, kangaroo, platypus (these are as strange in person as ever, but very cute) and we got to see our huge scary spiders again. In case you were curious, they are called Orb spiders and have the strongest webs in the world.

This one was at least the size of my hand, and
we constantly had to walk under them, shudder

We left early and went to the Gallery of New South Wales to see a Portrait contest. The show had some AMAZING portraits but it was really, really, crowded and hung in a very small space for the amount of work. In the end, I got a little claustrophobic and just bought a catalogue so I could look up pieces later.

Looking back, a lot of things were against us and most of what we ended up doing was eating, but it was a good time. The hotels we stayed in both had amazing breakfasts. The B&B had fresh mint tea and a continental European breakfast with ‘fresh milk’ whatever that means, and the second hotel in Sydney had this awesomely extravagant buffet deal with really good juice combinations. My favorite was kiwi pear mint. So usually we had late lunches and I was SO full by dinner…oh well, I suppose I will have to get my American appetite back somehow.

I loved Sydney itself. It had all of these really interesting old buildings on the water and of course the bridge and the opera house were beautiful. It really reminded me of Como and Venice in Italy; I think it would be a fun place to live IF you could live downtown by the water. It is like LA in that the suburbs go on forever.

Very pretty, and pricey, by the water

Anyway, back to reality. My fridge is broken and I am eating pasta for almost every meal at home. Before we left, we shove lots of stuff in the freezer because that was still working, but at some point while we were gone even that shut off so now I just have a smelly freezer and no roommates….sigh. Ironic that I moved here because I didn’t have a fridge in the hostel…

Oh well, I must go work on painting now; I am fairly behind and have a meeting with my professors tomorrow. Cheers!