Friday, April 13th, 2012: Canberra, ACT
Bob: Karen took a day off work and drove us around Canberra and environs, and it was such a relief for me not to have to do the driving. The Australian drivers are courteous and law-abiding, but Canberra has a rather arcane non-grid layout of streets that is difficult for us to deal with. The plus side of that street arrangement is that all of the major government buildings in Canberra are beautifully situated on hills beside charming lakes and so forth. Our first stop was the National Gallery of Art where we spent a couple of hours reviewing the collection. Since I had seen very good examples of Aboriginal work in the South Australian museum, I concentrated on art representing the settlement period to the present modern era. I was pleasantly surprised that I had fun not only with the realistic and impressionistic artists of Australia's past, but also some of the truly modern artwork from the last few decades. Even those modern pieces conveyed emotions, vivid actions, or interesting situations to me, which is not my typical reaction to modern art. |
Monika: Today was spent seeing some of the highlights of Canberra. Karen first took us to the National Gallery of Art. The building itself was spectacular, with art outside to complement the art inside. Inside was a great variety of styles mainly of Australian artists from the time of settlement to present. It was an impressive collection. |
Bob: Have I mentioned that Karen seems to have friends everywhere? We were just toodling along in one of the galleries when the head guard person chanced by, and of course he turned out to be another friend of Karens! After introductions were made, we all chatted amiably for a bit and then he recommended a special exhibit in the back for us to see while he went back to work. After lunch we stopped at the National Portrait Gallery and looked at both famous and infamous people from Australia's history. After reading many of the capsule biographies posted alongside the portraits, I concluded that one way to learn about Australia's complex history would be to simply spend a day or two at the portrait gallery actually reading in detail all of those life-stories and then putting it together with the visual information of the portrait itself. That's not a standard way to study history, of course, but if the set of portraits is a broad, cross-section of a country's people, it is certainly one way to go about it. We closed off the afternoon by driving to various sights around the city of Canberra. Since Karen was both doing the driving and providing commentary, we could relax and enjoy all the sights. Canberra is a carefully designed capital city, and in the bright sunshine of a crisp fall day it was absolutely beautiful, so we took a LOT of pictures from the lookout points around town. |
Monika: After lunch we saw one more art museum, the National Portrait Gallery, where you could see paintings and photographs of important Australian people and read small biographies. This was indeed fascinating. The last part of our afternoon was spent driving through Canberra. Canberra is a designed city, like Washington, DC, but instead of being designed in a grid, it was designed in circles. The middle of the city is a big artificial lake, next to which are the museums. Going up a hill on one side are the old and the new Parliament Buildings. On the other side is a wide Avenue, the ANZAC Parade, at the end of which is a truly spectacular War Memorial that we had visited during Wanderung 20. The War Memorial is in remembrance of World Wars I and II. The ANZAC Parade is lined with memorials to all the other wars were Australian blood was shed. There are parades here on Rememberance Day (November 11, the end of World War I) and ANZAC day (April 25, the day thousands of Australian and New Zealand soldiers lost their lives on the shores of Gallipoli). All of this city design is best seen from the Television Tower which is on a hill above the War Memorial, where Karen took us. A wonderful place to take pictures of Canberra and the surrounding countryside. |
Bob:
For dinner we visited Karen's daughter Jeffie, who, apparently following in her mother's footsteps, also cooked us a gourmet meal, and I'm not just whistling "Dixie" when I say that. The chicken was some Moroccan recipe that had a combination of spices plus the slow cooking that produced a unique flavor that I have never tasted in chicken before. Chicken can so easily be bland and boring, especially if you eat it a lot as we do, so it was nice that Jeffie had produced a truly different and pleasant flavor for the chicken.
The eggplant dish was not only beautifully prepared but prettily presented. The eggplants were roughly the size and shape of chocolate-chip cookies, and they had an "icing" of I think some kind of yogurt concoction on top plus some variety of seed or berry that looked for all the world like chocolate chips. Now normally I am no huge fan of eggplant, and maybe I was just being lulled into complacency or acceptance by the resemblance to chocolate chip cookies, for which I have an undue fondness, but those “eggplant cookies” really tasted great. I ended up having at least two and I think three of them, and I don't recall any previous instance in my life that I have had second and third servings of an eggplant dish.
But enough about food, as exquisite as it was. The real treasure of the evening was getting to meet and really talk to Jeffie. I was so happy that she had kept the guest list down to the four of us even though I knew full well that Karen had, at a minimum, 20 or 30 people in the Canberra area who would have been all too happy to celebrate her birthday with her, even without Jeffie's gourmet cooking as a lure. I know this because there was a constant stream of phone calls and text messages during the day, each one being another friend wishing her happy birthday. But being just the four of us, I got to talk to Jeffie in detail and that was a blast as it turned out that she and Monika and I all enjoyed the same type of fiction and were interested in similar fields of the arts and sciences.
Finding that similarity, we could exchange favorite authors and recommend new ones for each other to read, and finding a really compatible new author to read is for me more valuable than gold. After a very nice evening we three returned to Karen's place for the night, mentally preparing ourselves for the last leg of our Australian journey to Sydney, New South Wales, on the morrow.
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