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Published: March 10th 2008
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I've had quite a contrasting couple of days. Today I went on a trip to Canberra, the capital of Australia and location of its parliament. Yesterday, however, I went to a wine festival. Oh yes.
New South Wales has lots of wine producers, but most of the bigger companies in Australia are based in Victoria or South Australia. In an attempt to raise the profile of local wine, the Sydney Morning Herald is holding a wine week with lots of events at restaurants and the like around the state. The opening event was held in Hyde Park yesterday, and involved over 100 producers in little gazebos, many food stalls run by local restauranteurs, live jazz, glorious sunshine and a very drunk Sarah. I wandered along for the start at 11am and, feeling up for it, bought ten little tickets which each allowed me a 60ml serving. Even with a break halfway through for some rather yummy cayenne and cumin calamari on rocket salad, I felt decidedly out of it after my four fifths of a bottle, and had a rather interesting evening sobering up and getting slightly hungover all before I went to bed! It reminded me a lot of
Christmas day actually. I had a really fun day - the musicians were excellent, the wine was delicious and there was such a great atmosphere in the park, with couples, families, groups of friends and older people all mingling with no rowdiness or obvious drunkeness at all. They were obviously all hiding it as well as me! I soon developed a strategy of visiting stalls that were offering free tasters of food along with the drink, or ones that had given amusing names to their wine. This led to me trying the quite brilliantly named "Big men in tights" which was a very full-bodied rose. There was also a comedy moment when someone at a stand asked me what sort of wine I usually enjoy - I decided that "Any cheap rubbish I can get for under a fiver" probably wasn't the best response at this point, and made up something about the lighter whites. Genius.
Anyway, today was a very different experience as I spent a total of eight hours on the road (including breaks) to get to Canberra. Purpose designed and built to be the capital of Australia when it was decided that none of the state
capitals should keep this responsibility, it's not the most interesting of cities as almost every building is fairly modern and related to politics in some way. Having said that, we visited the Museum of Australia, a very interesting structure with content that you wouldn't necessarily expect from a national museum. It's more of a social history of the country with lots of exhibits about ordinary people. Following that we went round Parliament House which was opened in 1988 and which is very cleverly designed with lots of interesting features. It's built into a hill and there's grass growing on the outside that you can walk on, so the people can always be above their representatives. There are also soundproofed viewing galleries in both chambers so that school children can visit, listen to the debates and ask questions. These galleries were purposely designed for children - every child here has to visit three buildings of national interest during their school career and these visits are subsidised so they can come for free and see how their political system works. I think this is an excellent idea.
Our final stop today was the national War Memorial which is a beautiful building
Museum of Australia
The foyer had twisty walls and ceilings with lots of these big windows at the other end of the main street from the parliament. My favourite parts were the eternal flame in the lake, the roll of honour into which poppies were stuffed between each panel, and the tomb of the unknown soldier. There's a huge museum underneath the memorial which it would take at least a day to explore fully, but I had a quick look round and spent some time in the Victoria Cross room where the citations of each Australian VC are displayed. At 5pm each day when the memorial closes, there's a lovely ceremony where all the remaining visitors and staff are gathered in the central courtyard to listen to the Last Post played (very well!) by a trumpet player who then walks into the room where the unknown soldier's tomb is. The doors are closed behind him and then everyone goes home. I was glad we could be there to see this.
We stopped quickly at a viewing point on the way home to take some pictures of the whole of Canberra, and then started on the long drive back. I'm pretty tired now and am looking forward to a lie-in tomorrow.
I'd just like to
say a quick Happy 21st Birthday to my not-so-little brother! I hope you have a fab time at the ball tonight.
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