canberra

Am in Canberra, where the weather is coolish and raining - quite a change from the last time we came up! We flew up last night with Virgin, which since I last flew with them have adopted the world's stupidest practice system for boarding pass allocation and luggage check in. Basically you now have to print out your boarding pass - having queued to use one of the working terminals, of which at least half were out of order - before then queuing in order to check bags. It's great for Virgin - two staff on counters instead of at least five - and absolute shit for passengers. If possible I'll be avoiding them in future.

We slept in this morning, not least because of staying up to watch the Tour last night and because there is no traffic noise in Canberra. We may be literally 5 mins from the CBD, but there appear to be no cars, and certainly no doof happening. Strange.

This afternoon we wandered around the National Museum - I'm really not sure how accessible this would be to a non-Australian audience. It came across more as a 'flavours of Australia' rather than a coherent whole, and assumed some knowledge of the cultural significance of things like Hills Hoists and FJ holdens. I highly recommend the 'centra' exhibition, and not just because the first third ("land") comes across like a David Lynch movie. No murders though. :-) We didn't see the whole thing, obviously.

We also did a drive around the embassies, which was entertaining, particularly when we had a protective services car shadowing us for a block or so. Heh.

Tomorrow we're catching up with friends and wandering around some more, not sure where yet.

Then back to Melbourne and the working week.