Vapor Trails: Adelaide

As I arrived in Adelaide quite late in the evening I was struggling to find a place to stay. I ended up in a real dump with beds crammed into a small room, but managed to book the rest of my time at the Youth Hostel down the road.

What to say about Adelaide? Loads of people had told me not to waste my time even going there, but I thought it was OK. A bit of a backwater, but nice all the same. If you get bored reading this post - just scroll down to the last picture - it will make you smile :-)

What surprised me is that there is loads of cultural stuff in Adelaide - there were several hundred posters up in the Youth Hostel from Opera to Metal, comedy through to dance. Nothing on while I was there though.

I've been reading Bill Bryson "A Short History Of Nearly Everything" and he mentions some fossils in the South Australia Museum in Adelaide which are said (although no one really knows for sure - it could be a right old load of cobblers as they can't actually date the rocks so it's just a guess - and assuming you believe that kind of thing) to be of the earliest forms of life. It was pretty cool to read about these fossils and then actually get to see them.

A few other stories from my time in Adelaide:

I ended up in one of the art galleries, and they had these pictures of when the settlers arrived. The first picture showed the Settlers and the Aborigines, and we were told how the "Australian" settlers were really interested in the Aborigines and wanted to learn the language and support their culture.

The next picture, we were told, was a sad picture, because it showed displaced Aborigines after the "British" settlers took all of there land from them.

This went on a few times, and there was me thinking that there was only one set of settlers. It left me wondering where the Australian settlers came from...

We then went to the modern art section, and the guide goes along the lines of: when I look at art, I like to ask: what is it? But when I look at this stuff I just can't find an answer. You might like it, but it makes no sense to me.

And that was the art guide. There was actually some really good contemporary art in there as well.

Like this one piece that when you looked at it at first it just looked like a black rectangle, but after a while you could see a very faint photograph of a young boy materialise. This couple walk up and start making these really sarcastic comments, along the lines of "well really - how much did they pay for that."

So I say - it is rather good when you study it and see the picture of the boy. And then suddenly they see it, and there like, wow this is really great :-)

I then head to the wine museum, and get chatting to a guy who says he's going up to the Penfold's Winery, did I want to go. So off we went and spent a rather enjoyable afternoon tasting the wine.

Stuck of other stuff to do, I head to Port Adelaide, but there was nothing happening, so jumped on the train back into town and headed off to Glenelg which is the nearest beach, and had a rather pleasant evening wandering along the beach.

And that was about it for Adelaide.

Here's some pics:

One of the older buildings in Adelaide: