hnpcc | What I did on my weekend, part I

My weekend started early, Thursday night to be exact. Thanks to Freakazoid bombing out of the finals (18-10) there was no netball. Instead 5 out of the 8 of us met up at the pub. As we got there it was pouring with rain. Every single person came in with a bit of a grin on their face, going "aren't you glad we got knocked out? Look at the rain!" Oh we are such dedicated sports-people, really. After we'd ordered food, but before it actually arrived a guy came in from the front bar and asked if we'd like to do trivia. Why not? So we informed the wait staff as to where we'd gone, picked a team name ("Freakazoid" - duh) and settled in. At half time we were somewhat surprised to find that we were in the lead. This meant that all of us felt obligated to stay until the end, just in case we won. (Oh, and because the food hadn't arrived yet - took 1 and a half hours from when we'd ordered. Naturally this was our fault because we'd ordered an entree... *sigh*) Only two of us (myself and Lex) hung around for the scores to be read out though - but it was totally worth it when we came in first with a score of 53, easily beating the next team who had 50. So there it is, Freakazoid's highest ever score - and with only 5 players!

We think we might have had a slight advantage with the quiz questions - looking around the bar nearly everyone else there was early to mid 20s, whereas we are all 10 or so years older. So questions like: Berlin is the current capital of Germany. What was the capital before that? were kind of easy. We sucked at the music/film questions though. Apparently so did everyone else.

Friday I took off to fly up to Canberra to visit family. Because I was going for the cheapest available option, I ended up arriving with Tiger Air at 10am. Naturally all my family were at work, and couldn't meet me until at least 5. So I wandered.

The last time I went to Canberra they were in the process of building a new shopping centre in the CBD. That's now finished, and amongst other things it contains a Borders and a Koko Black. I ignored both of them on the grounds that I could do them in Melbourne and went wandering instead.

The first place I found was the Canberra Museum and Gallery, which had exhibitions focused mostly on Canberra. It was good, not least because they had a cloakroom where they required me to dump my bag. Even hand luggage gets tiring after a while! The strangest part of the gallery was a handbag exhibition - beautiful but strangely impractical (to my mind at least) pieces from the 1950s made predominantly out of hard plastics. As part of the exhibition they had Private Hell 36 running on loop - and all because Ida Lupino's first appearance was with a classic example of the bag. I sat watching for the first 30 minutes for her to appear - and then nearly missed noticing the damn bag! (I was engrossed by the story, what little of it I could hear. It's also probably not a good sign when you're having trouble working out who the bad guys are, and wondering whether film noir is so called because you can't see anything at night. Certainly not in this film, anyway.)

After exhausting the possibilities of the museum, I resumed wandering. Right outside was the ACT Legislative Assembly (itself the subject of one of the exhibitions - a surprising number of Canberrians didn't want a territory government. Probably because they knew they'd have to rock up to vote more often.) The Assembly is in one of the godawfulest 1960/70s buildings I have ever seen. I decided to keep wandering past it.

The thing with Canberra, right, is that it's all bloody circles. This is confusing if you're not actually paying enough attention. By following paths that looked interesting (and a sign to the casino, which I wasn't aware Canberra had) I found myself at Glebe Park, which was impersonating a European park in winter that day (Canberra being overcast and misty). Glebe Park doesn't actually have that much in it, but I did find a statue of Gandhi and a nice gazebo.

Looking at my watch I decided I should probably head back towards the CBD. As well as meeting my family I was also catching up with a friend. Fortunately I knew where I was. Sort of. As it turned out, it was lucky that I was running early to meet her, because quite seriously? I wasn't sure where I was (well, other than "Glebe Park".) Good thing that Canberra has a dearth of tall buildings, because as I came around the edge of the park the Canberra Centre loomed back into view. Right across the road. (OK, that would have been obvious even in somewhere like New York.) I'd walked in a very large circle without noticing. This didn't stop me getting lost inside the actual centre though, something else at which I am very good. Why don't they put gridlines on the floor to aid navigation in these places? It'd help me no end if I knew I was in square F5 and the shop I needed was in A7. It was also be helpful if they didn't have an enormous DJ's blocking the middle section.

I managed to find my way in time to meet

sardonic_otter in Borders, after she'd finished her yoga. We headed out to a cafe for a late lunch, which was very nice, and then made the rookie mistake of going to Koko Black for "a coffee". Or, as we ended up having after I spotted it on the menu, "A hot chocolate and a chocolate martini/mousse combination." Which was really, really nice, but kind of a lot after we'd eaten lunch already. We tried to walk it off a bit through the shopping centre, but I was still feeling vaguely nauseous when she handed me off to my sister who was meeting me in Borders. My sister then promptly took me to the chocolate cooking book section to find a birthday present for her friend. Didn't help. :-)

Back to my sister and brother-in-law's new house, which I hadn't been to before. It's a very nice house although they are going to have to upgrade the kitchen - if the benches are too low for me and my sister, then my 6ft brother-in-law is going to end up crippled trying to use them. And you can't fit a dishwasher under them, and a dishwasher is a Very Good Thing. (I may be slightly too much in love with my dishwasher.)

After going through all the nooks and crannies (and dumping my bags) we headed out to a birthday party. This was for one of my sister's friends, who I also know from when she lived in Melbourne. As it turned out I actually knew quite a few people there, which was good, and the Vietnamese food was fantastic (no, I've no idea how I got hungry again.) Even better, the walls were papered with handwritten recommendations from people, which, being Canberra and all, included a few well known politicians. At least one of whom can't spell "gourmet", as it turns out. I had quite a bit of fun signature spotting.

At the end of the night my sister asked if I'd mind going home via the new house of one of the couples I didn't know. No problem, I love perving at other people's new houses. It turned out that this couple had gotten married in April, and that just about everyone at the birthday bash except me had been part of the bridal party. So we watched their wedding video. Now that was fun. Seriously, it was. For starters we fast forwarded through the actual ceremony, preferring to watch the "funny bits" i.e. the painfully set up pre-wedding shots of the bride getting ready, the groom and groomsmen "unselfconsciously" "horsing around", and - of course - the wedding speeches. Well, one particular wedding speech. There's always one. This one was by the groom's grandfather, and was very amusing. Particularly when he began to sing. More so when he followed it up with a parody song. Heh. Then we watched people dancing, in particular one guy in a purple jacket who was on the floor the entire night (so it seemed) and who no one knew. God only knows who he was (he may well have wandered in from the wedding next door) but he certainly was having a great, if somewhat unco-ordinated, time. It was only three quarters of the way through the video that someone mentioned that my brother had also been at this wedding. He's fantastic at avoiding cameras then, because I didn't see him once. Of course, he may not have been dancing.

Eventually we ran out of video to laugh at and all headed home into the night. Which, being Canberra, was bloody freezing.