Canberra
April 14, 2008
So I arrived in Canberra a flight before my luggage did. To be fair to Quantas, I only just about made the connection in Sydney, so I wasn’t over surprised that I ended up looking at a empty luggage carrousel at Canberra airport. By the time I got back to my hotel, my case was waiting for me, so all’s well that ends well.
Canberra is a strange place – like most cities that are created, it seems to have no atmosphere. Wide avenues where the buildings on the other side are too distant for you to have any connection with them.
The National Library is impressive,and the their auditorium in which I presented was excellent. On the first evening Mark Corbould gave me a lift to my hotel. He went via a circuitous route so that I could get a view of the city, and a view of many of the embassy buildings. Because it is a new city, each country has built it’s own embassy building. It was good fun trying to guess which was which, purely from the architectural design.
Instead of flying from Canberra, I hired a car, which I attempted to pick up the night before. I failed in this because I left my driving license back in the hotel room. Guess who felt a right pillock in the Eurocar office!
Picture of National Library by Luke Shingle, from Flickr.
