Adelaide

I'm in Melbourne again now, but let me tell you about Adelaide...

As we stopped for lunch in the town of Frances just on the border of Victoria and South Australia, a man in a suit stopped to ask what we were doing lolling around on the grass outside a pub. After we explained and said we were traveling to Adelaide, he said "Ahh, Adelaide? That's where people go to die. Heh, I shouldn't say that; I'm from Adelaide". When speaking to Aussies about Adelaide in the past, the worst I've heard is that "Adelaide has the worst drinking water in the world; cargo ships refuse to fill their tanks there". As such, it seems that the locals think of Adelaide as a smaller version of Brisbane.

They may be right, but I liked Brisbane, and my time in Adelaide was fine, even though at the time, I was complaining of having nothing to do.

The YHA hostel was friendly and welcoming; with a pool table, lovely kitchen, a home-brew jukebox PC and a ping-pong table.

I went with a girl I'd met called Christina (who claims to have worked as an abseiling high-rise window-cleaner back in Sydney) to a "Reconciliation Faire". There were all manner of freebies,; radios, tennis balls, stickers, lanyards and even free hot-dogs. I had a chat with a man from a stall who turned out to be Aboriginal who was a lawyer specialising in Indigenous Relations and who traveled around the country (often camping under the stars) to meet the far-out tribes and groups, discussing their needs. He was called Fred.

After that, a few days passed. Coffee was drunk from the coffeehouse in the middle of Rundel St Mall, I read my book* and ping was ponged.

On the last night before I flew to Sydney, one of the guys came running into the common room exclaiming "There's a table football competition in the bar down the road! - No teams have entered yet and they need five teams to make the league. The winning team gets a $100 bar tab! We should go, then whoever wins can share out the beers!"

So we did. All eight of us. There turned out to be one other team made up of locals.

Huzzar, one of the YHA teams won (the team I was on "The Drop-Bears" came third), and so we drank late into the evening. The barman even ordered pizza for us! (It looked good, it smelt good too... ).

And so I left Adelaide, drunk on winning, and hung over from the resultant celebrations.


* I was despirate for a book to read; the only one I could find that wasn't a soppy romance book was a compilation of Jeremy Clarkson's column from the Sunday Times. Sorry :(

That which is nothing

We bought a fruit. It looked tasty and it was cheap from the Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne. The woman at the stall assured us that it was delicious, that you could eat both the fruit itself and the skin.

For the princely sum on AU$1, we took the persimmon back to the hostel, split it in four and started eating it.

Persimmons are the worst fruit in the world. Not because they taste bad. Because they are lazy. They have no flavour, they have no taste, their texture is that of indifference. Persimmons just don't try. At all. They taste and feel of nothing. They give you nothing in return for your AU$1, and you are left with a heart heavy with disappointment.