Australian National Museum

So - first impression of Canberra - it's physically a huge city, and nobody lives here.

Seriously!

OK, so it was busy at the train station yesterday, but once we'd gotten on the bus to head to Nikki's house, the streets were almost empty of cars. At the time I'd wondered if it was because of the time of day, but apparently not. Jen and I left the house around 11am today (after FINALLY talking to an electrician, and making an appointment for him to come to the house around 5pm) and headed to the Australian National Museum. The streets were almost completely empty of cars. There was nobody on the sidewalks. There was no one at the bus stops. I like how Jen put it - it felt a little like we'd stepped into one of those horror movies, you know, when the stranger comes to town for a visit and nobody's around, but that's only because the entire town has been turned into vampires or zombies and is just waiting for the right moment to strike...?

Seriously though, Canberra is a pretty city. It is a planned city full of large boulevards and HUGE traffic circles. I was driving again today and I was certainly happy that there was so little traffic each time I came to one of the big roundabouts! I am really glad that Nikki and Steve are letting us borrow their car... there is no way we could get around here on our own, and the buses don't run all that frequently. The car we're driving sure grabs attention though... I was conscious of lots of heads turning in the few cars that passed us, and I particularly liked the group of kids that were hooting and shouting "AWESOME" out the window of their car as we were parking at the museum. But more on the car later. :-)

Today's destination was the Australian National Museum. Like many of the attractions here in Canberra, it is FREE. (I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the parking is also free! This week could easily turn out to be the most cost-effective week of our entire tour!) It is also enormous. The museum is housed in a huge, crazy modern building on a finger of land jutting out into Lake Burley-Griffin in the centre of town. I suspect that, like the War Museum in Ottawa, this is one of those buildings whose architecture is very symbolic, but we didn't have time to take a guided tour.

The museum focuses on the social history of Australia's peoples, starting of course with the indigenous populations and then moving on to the years of European settlement. The entire museum was extremely well done. The exhibits flowed one into the next, with lots of fun interactive stations to explore along the way. I particularly liked the huge map of Australia that was projected onto one wall - it was constantly displaying various bits of Australian geographical trivia... everything from endangered species to explorers routes to bush fire patterns. I watched that thing for a good 20 minutes and the information still hadn't repeated itself. Very cool. They also had a skeleton of a Diprotodon, an ancient, giant wombat the size of a cow that used to live here. It was displayed behind a semi-transparent screen that had a painting of a Diprotodon on it. When the screen was backlit, you only saw the outline of the animal and the skeleton behind the screen. When the screen was lit from the front, all you saw was the painting.

We saw lots of other fun/funny things at the museum, too. I liked the display of "cubbies"... there were four of them, and your job was to guess where each of them might be found in Australia. In Canada, these would be tree houses or kids' club houses. In the display, each of the cubbies had all sorts of articles inside that gave you clues about where they might be found. There was also a storytelling circle at an artificial boab tree, right in the heart of the museum. You climbed into the huge trunk of the tree and sat on benches inside. The ceiling inside the tree was made to resemble the night sky, complete with twinkling stars. And there was a screen that played animated interpretations of a variety of Aboriginal stories. Jen and I also really liked the "Australiana" section, where they had a funny display titled "Aussie for beginners". It was a wall of uniquely Aussie words, accompanied by funny cartoons, and then when you flipped the word around it gave you an explanation of what it meant on the back. The book store even sold copies of this display as a book - which we almost bought, strictly for the comics!

We wandered around the museum for hours and didn't manage to see all the exhibits! But we did find out that there is a didgeridoo demonstration being given this Sunday, so our plan is to go back, finish the last few exhibit halls, and listen to some didgeridoo pieces too. Thank goodness for free museums!

We had to leave around 3:30 to get back to the house and meet up with the electrician. When he arrived and did some poking around, it became clear that there was a faulty wire somewhere in the lighting fixtures of the house. Thank goodness it wasn't something as simple as a blown fuse - I would have felt terrible if the problem had turned out to be something I could have fixed on my own. So an hour of tinkering and $165 later, the issue was fixed and we had lights again. Hooray!

To celebrate, Jen and I went to see "The Golden Compass" last night. There's a cheap theatre on the far side of Canberra (of course) from Nikki's house, where the movies are only $8. (Most cinemas in Australia charge $15.50! That would be the #1 reason we haven't been to see more movies.) We'd passed the theatre the day before when we were on the bus, so it was just a matter of finding it again. When we arrived, Jen and I both turned to each other and remarked "I think we found everyone!". There were a number of cafes and pubs all along the streets around the cinema, and they were hopping! Pretty much every table was full! So I don't know where all the Canberrans were during the day, but apparently at night they all go to the cafes!

And the movie, by the way, was excellent. But I don't want to spoil it if you haven't seen it yet.