Canberra: Plastic Penis and Handcuffs in Parliment House. Sorry Rudd!

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Canberra, as nice a place as it is, is weird. To say it is the capital of Australia there is no-one there. It’s huge also and really tree-y!

We stayed in the YHA there and they had a spa pool, ooooooo. This was well appreciated by my aching body from all the surfing. The Deep Heat was no longer needed!

The first day we decided to walk to Parliament house. On the way there we walk on a bridge over a massive lake that had the biggest jet of water storming up into the sky. Yes it was impressive that it reached so high, but why? It wasn’t like it was a nice water feature, with little jets at the bottom making it picturesque. No it was just a huge jet of water in the air just because they can. Ah well.

Parliament house was cool, it was free to go in and look around, but you had to go through airport style security checks first. Oh and how funny that turned out to be. Robs had a penknife in his pocket so first they took that away from him; next they see something in his bag so have to have a look inside it. In the bottom compartment they open it up, there lies the metal toy handcuffs we won at a fairground in Exmouth, “I’ll be taking those” said the security guard “but there is also another metal object in your bag”. Ok, so the top compartment is opened, out pops a plastic penis joke toy that Jody had given Robs for his birthday. It was one that had an elastic strap on it so if you strapped it to your leg at the bottom it would poke out of the trousers making it look like you have a long willy. Robs tried to explain himself but the guard wasn’t bothered, he wanted to know what the other metal object was, it turned out to be Robs other knife he thought he’d lost. So here’s Robs with 2 knives, a pair of handcuffs and a plastic penis trying to get into Parliament house. When he went to pick up his knives at the end the guard asked him if he was expecting trouble!

Canberra also has the nicest War Memorial I’ve been to; it’s just so tranquil and well built. Then at the back of it is a huge war museum. I’m not normally one for war time things but it was really interesting and well done. Also free so worth checking out.

At the National Museum there was an Exhibition of Charles Darwin so we decided to go see that. It was worth it and I found out things about him that I didn’t know, even though I studied Evolution at uni would you believe. For instance, I never knew he married into the Wedgewood family, as in the pottery makers! We spent so long in this place that we then didn’t have the chance to look around the rest of the museum which was a shame.

We spent one night in Canberra, and really didn’t need to spend much longer; compared to other Australian places this was boring. All we needed to do now was spend 9 hours on a bus out of here to get to Melbourne; hopefully there will be more there!

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