George's day out

A lot has happened again since I last updated my blog. The most exciting was probably my trip to Canberra. I had no reason to go, but 1) it was a nice day, 2) one extra flight moved me up a status on the Qantas frequent flyer awards and 3) I had a book token to spend. In the end I lost the book token and so that was a bit pointless. Anyway, I arrived in Canberra in the morning after a lovely hour-long flight. My taxi driver assumed that I was a British tourist and started telling me how awful Sydney was and that I shouldn't go there. Apparently it's full of people who "swim in sewage", "sit for hours in smog because of the cars" and the city has no good museums or cultural events. In contrast, Canberra is apparently amazingly full of incredible museums, events and "things-to-do". I asked the driver to drop me near the lake because I wanted to walk around it. He told me that tourists didn't do this and that I'd prefer to see an exhibition on Renoir (I was told that Renoir was European many times). I pointed out that the exhibition didn't actually open for a few hours. He didn't seem to mind this and told me that I should spend the time waiting at the Museum of Australia (or some similar name) and then take a taxi across to the Renoir exhibition when it opened.

Not wishing to upset my taxi driver, I did get him to drop me off at the museum and discovered that they had an exhibition on Darwin (the man, not the place). The exhibition was good. They had quite a few of Darwin's notebooks including one in which he wrote down the pros and cons of marriage. Apparently a wife is "object to be beloved & played with. — —better than a dog anyhow". So now we know!

Darwin obviously didn't like Australia much. "From so grand a title as Blue Mountains, and from their absolute altitude, I expected to have seen a bold chain of mountains crossing the country; but instead of this, a sloping plain presents merely an inconsiderable front to the low land near the coast. From this first slope, the view of the extensive woodland to the east was striking, and the surrounding trees grew bold and lofty. But when once on the sandstone platform, the scenery becomes exceedingly monotonous; each side of the road is bordered by scrubby trees of the never-failing Eucalyptus family". The exhibition tried hard to explain that Darwin was homesick and sea-sick and would have liked Australia if he had been well!

Anyway, after looking around the museum I decided to walk around the lake. My map made it look as if it was probably about 10km around and that would get me close to the airport where I could then just walk back to my flight. Sounded good. In fact, I now discover that the walk was 36km of which I must have done about 25km before giving up. It was wonderful! Apart from a detour to walk through the botanic gardens I kept close the lake side and managed to spot heaps of creatures including black swans, a huge brown snake (which swam off after looking at me for a while), some stunning parrots and even kangaroos.

I was much too late to try and walk to the airport and so tried to find a taxi. Canberra's a ridiculous city ... there's nobody around. Even on my trip around the lake I only passed a few cyclists. Now I wanted a taxi. It was impossible. I walked everywhere trying to find one. Finally (and just after I'd really started to think that I'd miss my flight) a taxi did turn up and I managed to flag it down. This time the driver spent the entire journey telling me how awful Canberra was and how he thinks that the greatest city on Earth must be London. He'd never been to London, but had heard how wonderful it was. Apparently "Canberra is a hell-hole". Interestingly, he drove me to the airport and then he was arrested (as far as I could tell) by some policemen that seemed to be waiting for him (maybe, they had heard him criticising Canberra!).

What else? I've been on a few walks in the local national park with the summer students, it was ridiculously hot for a few days (42 degrees C), we've had some bushfires, Anna and Maureen came around to rehearse the Schubert's "Shepherd on the Rock", I had a BBQ for all the pulsar astronomers (and bought a remote-controlled, indoor helicopter which Jonathan immediately landed in a bucket of water) and work is going very well. I've just booked a trip to the USA in April and need to book more trips to Perth and Beijing in the next couple of months.

Lots happening!