~light of the world~

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

I just came back from my short trip to Canberra, for which I left yesterday morning and came back from this afternoon.

It was pretty last minute, but thankfully my cousin managed to get me a seat on a coach from the station to Canberra. But I had to get there pretty early to take the coach for more than three hours to get there.

Aunty Rose picked me up from Jolimont Centre and dropped me off at the Floriade at Commonwealth Park, which was my main aim in going there. Unfortunately, I think it's pretty early in the spring, so not all the flowers were totally grown/blooming yet. The flowers were generally arranged in a pattern resembling some picture, but I think because the arrangements were really big, so unless you're high enough, you can't really appreciate them.

After that I went on to cross the road over the lake to get to the National Library, which is a really cool-looking building. The bad thing is that I didn't go to find any books (not that I knew where they were), but used the free internet for like 40 minutes or so.

Then I moved on to the Old Parliament House, which has been converted into this museum of Australian democracy or something, and it was pretty cool, because they had this exhibition of democracy with touchscreens and everythng. I went to see this exhibition of all the Australian prime ministers thus far. They even had the recently elected one, so that's quite updated!

It's rather humbling to see how all the schoolkids know so much about their politics and history and stuff. I think we Singaporeans in comparison might be more apathetic.

When I left it was raining, and I walked on to the new Parliament House, but I reached there with only 15 minutes left to closing time, so I popped into the shop to get a couple of postcards and waited for Aunty Rose to pick me up again.

She brought me to her house, and we went out for dinner with Uncle Joseph and Tim at a Chinese restaurant, and the food was really nice! I stayed at their house for the rest of the time, just sleeping/watching tv/talking, and it was great.

This morning because Aunty Rose had to catch a flight to Sydney, Tim sent me back to the Jolimont Centre, and I took another long coach ride back to Central Station, wishing I had gone to the toilet before boarding.

So I calculated that I spent about 24 hours total in Canberra, 9 of which were spent sleeping anyway, so I didn't have that much time overall to visit places, but I guess I can always go again.

Labels: canberra

xuan blogged at 6:43 PM

May your light shine...
in the darkness...