Excellent, excellent times.

OK, so I am being quite tragic but I can't wait until I get back to Sydney to write about my time in Canberra because I'm beyond happy right now, for lots and lots of reasons.  Partly, Canberra is soooooooo tranquil and very, very green.  Yes, the architecture is not exactly very pretty but equally it kind of works because it's all from the same era rather but mainly because there is so much green!!!  There are gardens, lawns, parks all over and it's location is such that you can basically always see hills and trees on the periphery of the city.  Whilst Civic (the shopping centre) is not exactly pretty owing to the concrete and 1960s architecture, the city is cut basically in half by Lake Burley Griffin and you can walk along the side of it surrounded by greenery.  On the south side of the lake is the Parliament Zone, which contains most of the galleries and museums as well, and where I have spent the best part of the last two days.

Yesterday was the Masterpieces from Paris exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia and it was absolutely awesome even if I am slightly worried that I've become one of those arses that I never wanted to be and am now someone who looks at art and 'consides;  it.  This particularly struck me when I was looking at this painting with a man, a sail and a wave in it and I was like, 'Hm, there has got to be a reason that wave was drawn to be there rather than anywhere else.'  I'm so worried that I've become even more wanky.  I didn't help matters by going to buy myself a really lovely glass of wine (I'll confess it was $18) but being ever so slightly overly picky about which wine I would have - in the end a 2005 Cabernet Merlot from WA.  Even though it was a wine bar their choice of wines by the glass wasn't great, if I'm honest.  See?!  Wanky!!!  Anyway, veering back onto topic from quite a drastic tangent, even regardless of the exhibition the whole museum is absolutely amazing, with permanent works from Monet, Cézanne, Lichtenstein, Warhol (his portraits of Chairman Mao), Francis Bacon - a whole range which unfortunately did include the expected rubbish modern art.  There was honestly a massive white plastic grid frame.  That was it.  That is not art.  Not even one per cent.  But there was one amazing modern art piece - models of motorbikes that had been molded to resemble stags fighting, with loads of rear view mirrors stuck on to resemble the antlers.  I kind of wish I'd taken a photo, but I didn't.

Yesterday afternoon I went to the Old Parliament house, which was quite nice.  All old and then you go to the government offices and they're 1960s monstrosities.  I've got photos of that which I'll post at some point in the next few days.  It was pretty cool and also they have a room about all the Prime Ministers of Australia.  I noticed that the first PM didn't have an Australian accent.  Neither did the guy who was Prime Minister during most of WWII.  I couldn't be bothered to listen to every single PM to establish when the accent came to be but so far as I can conclude it was somewhere between 1940 and 1970.  That's really quite a new accent but then listening to recordings of Prime Ministers is hardly representative.

Today was even better, I've had a bloody awesome time - I went to Parliament house and even though they had run out of tickets for listening to Question Time in the House of Representatives, I was told to go to the ticket desk and see what the crack was.  Anyway, I flirted my way into getting a ticket.  Into the central gallery.  SCORE!!  Question Time was hilarious as they were all behaving like unruly children and the Speaker of the House had to give warnings to sooooooooooo many MPs.  It was crazy but actually pretty interesting.  Kevin Rudd et al just kept pointing out what the Howard government had failed to do for 12 years and the Opposition... didn't do very much, really, actually.  Except two female MPs basically asked the exact same question and made the exact same point.  MP1 got up and said something like, 'Can the Prime Minister please explain to me why a female chef, earning $68,000, would earn only $9,770 for the 18 weeks during which she is entitled to paid parental leave, when under our plans the same woman would earn $26,000 over 26 weeks to give her the opportunity to spend time with her young child.'  PM's response was actually pretty funny - $10k is $10k more than she'd have received under the Howard government, who had not established a parental leave scheme at all.

Then, though, MP2, gets up and says, 'Can the Prime Minister please explain why a female sales account manager, earning $55,000, would only earn $9,770 for the 18 weeks during which she is entitled to paid parental leave, when under our plans the same woman would earn $19,000 over 26 weeks to give her the opportunity to spend time with her young child.  Is the PM favouring his friends in big business over families???'  What?!  It was funny, though.  Rudd repeated his point, of course, and made mention of actually giving parental leave when he could have retained the status quo disproved her point.  Yeah, the Coalition got their asses kicked, basically.

Man, I'm such a geek.  Mainly, though, the peace and quiet is a great relief.  I can actually hear birds and the wind and water and not just cars and people and loud bangs all the time.  Also, I must say, people here are absolutely lovely.  I've literally not come across a single horrible or rude person; they're all friendly and everybody I've walked past has smiled at me.  It's awesome.  Yeah, I reckon I could live here.

Tomorrow, then, before I get back to Sydney, I'm going to the War Memorial.  I don't want Carly to be annoyed with me.