A brief report from a weekend spent in Canberra: Went there, saw things, did stuff, came back.
A longer report from a weekend spent in Canberra: What a blast! I've always loved Canberra - it's a hoot of a town to visit and I've never had a bad experience there. Being the nation's capital, it has loads of "national" things to visit: National Art Gallery, National Museum, National Science thing etc etc and so on ad infinitum. Brilliant! Loads of stuff, but chief among them in my opinion are the National War Memorial, which is a vast museum-like thing as well as an inspirational memorial and fabulous architecture (pic below), and the National Art Gallery which boasts a Jackson Pollock (Blue Poles) which I literally just sat and looked at in stunned silence for 45 minutes the first time I saw it - astonishing to think such a deranged, drunken mind could create such a masterpiece.
But Canberra is a just a magnificent and bizarre place - the whole city is laid out as gigantic piece of architecture (Walter Burley Griffin designed the city layout originally), and the sense of space and landscape is on an astonishing, grandiose scale. There's nothing quite like it probably anywhere, but certainly nowhere else in Australia. It has this great habit of just imposing it self on you - one moment you're walking across a lawn to get to some museum or something when quite suddenly you realise you are at the intersection of some great man-made ley-lines, with avenues and rows of buildings radiating out from where you happen to be standing. It just hits you in a satisfying, gob-smackingly kind of way.
So it's no wonder that the Canberra marathon is one of the great races. I'm massively inspired to have a crack at it next year. So stay tuned for more details.
However one negative is the lack of pubs - whereas most Australian cities have pubs seemingly on every corner (and not a few in between as well), Canberra's pubs seem to be non-existent, or at least well hidden away. There are of course plenty of bars in the restaurants and hotels, so you can always get a drink, but if you're looking for a colourful, themed pub, you'll be out of luck. But there are plenty of good bottle shops, and with the average salary of this public-service city being rather higher than the national average, they stock some good stuff. And at least one wine shop I went into had a proper, locked, gravel-floored and un-signed cellar into which they'll let people who know about it, to peruse the really rare stuff. Mmm. "If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it I'm afraid, sir" - kind of rare.
And we had totally perfect weather: 26 degrees, impossibly blue sky, glorious sunshine and my mate's Audi TT Quattro open Sportster to bomb around in. Bliss and bliss again!
Only one running-related anecdote to relate: I was in the National Film and Sound Archive, watching a series of vignettes on the 60s, when on the screen popped up a photo of John Lennon's Quarrymen that Andy posted a few weeks ago (see below). I excitedly said to the bloke standing next to me "Ooh, see that bloke there! That's Paula Radcliffe's dad!". He said "Wow, really? Who's Paula Radcliffe?"
Anyhow, here's a few pics...
1) Paula's dad.
2) The War Memorial.
3) The gigantic flagpole atop the Parliament House.
4) A rare find in an Aussie grog shop.
5) Me being chaufferred around in aforementioned Audi TT Quattro Roadster.
6) Me showing my left-wing bias with a Canberra souvenir. (Gough Whitlam was the Labor PM who ended the conservative stranglehold on Aussie politics and brought the boys home from Vietnam, gave women equal pay and other socialist radical reforms in the early 70s. A great hero of mine!)
Nine tenths of five eighths of not much.
