Melbourne

Greetings from Melbourne,

Arrived in Melbourne this afternoon. It's hard to believe that my travels will over in 16 days. After 6 days in Melbourne, I'll spend 10 days in Scotland, and then it's back to Syracuse. It will have been six months and three weeks since I left home. Times flies when you're having an adventure.

When last I wrote, I had just arrived in Adelaide. Adelaide is a pleasant city. And just what did I do in Adelaide?

Visited the Barossa Valley. The Barossa Valley has beautiful scenery, and is famous for its vineyards. They make excellent shiraz, cabernet sauvignon, merlot, and port. En route to the valley, we stopped at a town famous for making wooden toys. And as a form of advertisement, they have huge rocking horse -- 60 feet tall -- on display in town. It seems towns in Australia and New Zealand like to create huge statues of things for which they are famous. You could climb to the top of the rocking horse for a view of..... who knows cuz I didn't feel like climbing up a metal horse in the pooring rain.

Next to the horse was a small zoo. There was a cage full of parrots of various types, including a fat pink trouble maker who would suddenly scream for no reason, causing the other twenty parrots to scream, puff their feathers, spead their wings and fly around the cage. Twenty odd screaming parrots make a terrifying and deafening noise. Then just as suddenly, they'd go silent, and the white ones would say "hello".

On the way home we visited the "whispering wall", which is really the curved wall of a reservoir. But sure enough, it sounds like the people at the other end are whispering in your ear despite the fact that they are really all the way over there on the other side. Takes five minutes to walk to the other side of the damn wall.

Kangaroo Island was nice. It's an island that his half farmers and half nature reserve. The island is full of koalas, kangaroos, wombats, possums, animals that look like porcupines but are not, penguins, seals, pelicans. You can see all these animals in the wild living their lives. And there are some beautiful secluded beaches as well.

Visited the port town of Glenelg. This is where the ships first landed when then came down to South Australia. Now-a-days, it's shops and restaurants and beautiful public beaches.

And there are several interesting museums in Adelaide, as well as a gorgeous botanical garden.

Over the weekend there was a Cabaret Festival. I saw a couple of performances.

The first was 6'5" Australian man, mid to late 40's, who pretended to be an 80 year old, uppper class, English woman. His character is a singer who has now incorporated hiphop music and lyrics to her songs. This was hilarious in a bizarre way (picture Queen Elizabeth rapping about her frustrations, but not using any foul language). Equally entertaining was the audience: white, middle-aged australians. At the end of the performance, the audience was required to engage in a hiphop version of the Hokey Pokey. Very, very strange.

The second show was a performance of two young women, dressed in corsets and striped socks, who performed and sang about topics that reflected concerns of women -- sex, their hair, finding love. They were very good. For their encore they did a song about why they hate Americans. It was very funny.

The hotel where I stayed was beautiful! It was a five star hotel that I gave me an incredible deal. The decore was 1920's, but in subtle colors and designs. And the concierge was a riot. He worked his fanny off.

And that was Adelaide.

cheers,
Stacey