Peter and I stayed in an apartment at Darling Harbour. To frolic around Sydney’s Darling Harbour was quite exciting. It was my 82nd birthday. At nighttime we strolled to an Italian restaurant and had a three course meal there with a glass of red wine. There was also some beautiful music to entertain us. We liked that very much. The food and the wine were very much to our liking as well. So we had a lovely evening. After the meal it was only a short walk back to our apartment.
How do you like this rule: Plenty of of exercise and eating no processed or junk food. Wouldn’t this be worth a try?
This is an excellent series. I had it on my blog in February 2015, but did not get many comments.
Decadence: The Meaninglessness of Modern Life
Pria Viswalingam
Review
Decadence is a 2006 Australian TV series examining the plummeting quality of Australian life, which director and narrator Pria Viswalingam blames on a global economic system based on frenetic consumption, fueled by debt and ridiculously long hours of work. The cinematography choreographs to perfection the self-indulgent moral degradation of a culture that has been subsumed by US political and cultural norms that reward narcissism and the vacuous idolization of celebrity.
The only critique I would have is the absence class perspective. I have a problem with Viswalingam’s blanket assertion that all Australians are working ridiculously long hours because they value the accumulation of luxuries more than family time or friendships. I think this criticism applies chiefly to the shrinking Australian middle class – which I estimate at around 20-30% of the population. From my experience, the majority of Aussies – like…
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Yesterday we bought a few things for our backyard.
We already planted somef things in these boxes. We may also use some pots for more planting. At the moment Peter is still struggling to remove some spread out roots of the camphor laurel tree. The main roots we had taken out by the people who removed our three obnoxious trees from our backyard. The far away roots of the camphor laurel tree are very, very thick. They lifted up some of the earth in the backyard. So Peter took it upon himself to try and get rid of some of them. They are so very hard. Peter thought maybe a chain-saw would do the job better than his little axe. So he bought one yesterday. Sadly, he found out, it does not work very well. He still has a hard time cutting through these roots.
There is one little bush left that stood near the camphor Laurel tree. It is cut back a lot, but perhaps may come back again.
Once we have levelled the area sufficiently, we may try out some of that synthetic grass.
Whenever we do some gardening,we do only a bit at a time. We cannot do too much in one day, otherwise we get too sore. After a couple of hours, we usually feel, that we have to stop.
THE MUSEUM OF AUSTRALIAN DEMOCRACY
is situated in the Old Parliament House.
We did drive to the Old Parliament House on that Friday morning after we had returned from our walk to Manuka. I wrote about this walk in my previous post.You can go back to it here:
We saw in the museum interesting historical things.
Buses did bring a lot of visitors to the museum.
1215 was the year when the MAGNA CARTA was first drafted.
At lunchtime we drove to this tavern, Wig & Pen, to have one of their delicious beers and some lunch.
Bike riding is quite popular in Canberra.
Our chosen beer was Imperial Russian (like a very strong Guinness),. and we were warned it had very much alcohol in it!
While waiting for our meal I had a look in this very interesting magazine about beer brewing:
Peter is happy with his meal.
I liked my spicy vegetarian meal. However it turned out, I had to leave some of it. It was just too much!
In my first post about our visit to Canberra
I mentioned that on Saturday, the 27th of August, we went to the Telstra Tower and later on to the National Museum.
At nighttime of that same Saturday, which was our last day in Canberra, the Museum of Australian Democracy presented
THE HANSARD MONOLOGUES (Age of Entitlement) and we had tickets for this very interesting show. As I said before, the Museum of Australian Democracy is in the Old Parliament House.
If you haven’t seen it yet, you might like to have a look at this website:
http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Hansard
We departed Canberra on Sunday, the 28th of August. Our first stop was Goulburn where we had some coffee and cake in a building from 1889.
Then, we drove on to Bowral and had a lovely lunch there with our friends G and H.
Driving home we went down MacQuarie Pass with some pies from the Robertson Pie Shop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuka,_Australian_Capital_Territory
We had arrived at our hotel on Thursday, the 25th of August. The following morning we wanted to walk to Manuka to have breakfast there. It was a crisp, sunny morning. We knew, Franklin Street would take us straight to Manuka Shopping Centre, however we chose a different way so that we would have a bit more of a walk.
Before we left, we placed this sign outside our door so the staff would know that we weren’t in bed any more!
Our hotel was at National Circuit, Instead of turning right to Franklin Street we turned left.
The following pictures are all taken on this early morning walk to Manuka and back. On the way we noticed some early spring flowers and blossoms. We had breakfast in Manuka at a baker’s shop. We also had a look at the inside of the Catholic Cathedral in Manuka.
Back at the hotel
We could park our car right in front of our room.
This was a rented car. We had to leave our car behind for it needed new spark plugs. We had left home early in the morning. Our plan had been to drive up Macquarie Pass to Moss Vale for breakfast at a cafe in Moss Vale. We found out that Macquarie Pass was closed for maintenance work. So we went up the Jamberoo Mountain Road Pass to the highlands. To arrive at our chosen cafe in Moss Vale via this pass instead of Macquarie Pass took us just an extra ten minutes.
After our very good breakfast in Moss Vale we drove straight through to Canberra where we spent a couple of hours at Parliament House before checking in at Forrest Hotel at around 2pm.
I wrote about our visit to Parliament House here in my previous post:
All hotels in Australia provide you with tea and coffee making facilities. We had bought some cake in Moss Vale for our afternoon coffee.
We liked to have coffee and cake in our room.
Peter is about to unpack.
Top right the air-conditioning kept the room at 22C at all times. We never had to reset it.
When the air-conditioning switched itself on, the air came out really hot. After a little while it would switch itself off again. I thought, this worked really well. I never felt cold in our room, even though the outside temperature would be a cool 5 degrees C during the night.
This is early morning Peter in bed probably with a cup of tea.
During the night we topped our bed with a woolen blanket. There were a couple of Australian made woolen blankets in our wardrobe. That these blankets were actually Australian made, was very much to my liking!
