Here We Go...

So, we (D and I) arrived in Canberra yesterday afternoon. We flew down in a Qantas Dash. If you are not familiar with this particular aircraft, then lucky you. Imagine a rather cheap coach with wings. It had propellors! And no TV or free beer. Generally, the flight was icky.

Canberra though, is not icky. It's cold, in a casual kind of way - you just get the feeling that it's really not trying. Yes, the temperature in the middle of the day is colder than Brisbane in the middle of the night, but you know it could get a lot colder if it tried.

We met some of the people I'll be working with at dinner last night at the Italo-Australian club. We got stuck at the geek table though because I was too tired to try fighting for a place with the interesting looking people. They all laughed at me for wearing two pairs of gloves, but in turn I laughed at their primitive smoking laws (you can smoke inside), ridiculously expensive beer ($17 for six Extra Drys) and lack of Paul's milk. It turns out though that the beer and milk is just a local phenomena in Manuka (pronounced Mah-nu-ka apparently).

Manuka is just like South Bank, with lots of expensive food shops, clothes shops and pharmacies. Breakfast this morning cost us $50, but by god was it worth it. I was a little skeptical at first about a $15 sandwich, but what I got was a huge pile of salad with rashers of bacon, swiss cheese, a whole boiled egg and half an avocado, with two little slices of bread at the side. And the avocado was a whole heap nicer than any I've seen in Brisbane for quite a while. I think the kinds of fruit and vegies available in Canberra are going to suit my Victorian-bred taste buds. I never could bring myself to like all the tropical fruit so fashionable in Queensland (with the notable exception of pineapple).

For some reason, half of the trees here are dead. They have no leaves at all. The grass and all the little plants are green though (there are even flowers - you know the floopy soft looking kind that like to get watered regularly), except for big yellow patches that I'm guessing are frost bite or something. Apparently, ice just appears here out of the blue. You wake up in the morning and your car is covered in ice and the water in the radiator has frozen. I'll believe it when I see it.

And the last crazy tale with which I will regale you is that there doesn't seem to be an Asian food industry here. I've seen one Thai restaurant and one sushi shop which was closed. The sub-culture is more European, with Italian appearing to be the flavour of the day - we went to the Italo-Australian club last night and I've seen a couple of Italian restaurants, an Italian cultural centre and an Italian baby clothes shop - "Bamboozle - The boutique for bambini".

Alright, that's all for now. I'll keep you posted when we've actually done something - I start work on Monday and we get the car on Tuesday so next time I post I'll have actually moved more than a km from where we're living.