New Adventures Sunday 2.3.08

This is eerie. We rise and shine, do a few chores, explore around town a bit visiting the retail area and town gathering place where there are entertainers and a market going on, grab a bite of lunch with a cold beer, we walk through the park that separates one side of the central city from the other where we check out the botanical gardens and playing fields and hit the arts district where there is an afternoon art fair in full swing. We head back to the hotel for a bit of a rest before heading out for some Asian food. Wait a minute, this is an exact repeat of yesterday, and yesterday was GROUND HOG DAY!!!

Okay, there are a couple differences. The chores we had this morning included getting up at 3:00 AM to be at the airport at 5:00 to catch our 6:25 flight to Melbourne, continuing on to Adelaide. Once again everything was as smooth as it could be. We caught an earlier than scheduled flight from Melbourne and reached our hotel in Adelaide before noon local time. Adelaide is 2-1/2 hours (how do you do that?) behind Christchurch so we have been up for almost 12 hours after a couple hours sleep and our desk guy gets us right into our room.
The eerie part is that the fellow who laid out Adelaide also laid out Christchurch and the central part of the cities are very, very similar. Christchurch has a population of about 400,000 while Adelaide is 1.2 million so there is more sprawl here, but we almost didn’t need a map to get around in the central business district where our hotel is located. Additionally, Adelaide is the capital of the state of South Australia while Christchurch is the principle city of Canterbury but the similarities probably end there. ChCh, as we mentioned, is the most English and genteel of NZ cities while Adelaide is a shipbuilding port on the ocean side and a mining, agricultural center on the inland side so it has a much more rough and tumble image. We got a feel for that on the plane from Melbourne when we noticed that most of the fellas were wearing their wife-beater shirts, although not the pilot. If Adelaide has any English to it, it would be Newcastle.

Our hotel is on Rundle Mall, the pedestrian only shopping and entertainment street. There are tons of folks milling about when we go out for lunch in spite of the 90+ degree heat. They have had a dry and painfully hot summer and it shows in the brown landscape. It is overcast, hot, humid and still which is not a way for a city to make a good impression on its new visitors, but the beer is really cold and our veggie pizza is first rate. We did the park and art fair thing only to keep from sleeping all day but we were both happy to get back to the room late afternoon for some air conditioning and a nap.

When we checked in the desk guy told us that the Chinatown we had heard so much about was actually a China-lane, but he assured us that there were a couple worthwhile restaurants there and we should give it a visit. When we went back out at about 6:30 all of the shoppers were gone leaving a few semi-rowdy teenage groups milling about so it was a bit uncomfortable. We did find China "lane" but nothing jumped out at us so we went back to the "Grange" restaurant which was on our list and in the same neighborhood. The table next to us was a group of young Chinese folks so we thought we had made the right call. We both had the fresh snapper special on slivered pea pods, wilted lettuce, and a little champagne sauce. It was perfect but we both thought we could have used a bit of starch on the plate and we were missing our Kiwi chefs already. We need more food.

The walk back to the hotel was better. There were more people around so we had obviously just hit a dead time slot when we left earlier. We manage to stay awake until 9:00 before crashing.

Today's Local Headline: Locked Up in Vegas Adelaide Sunday Mail (It is discovered that a local footballer had been arrested 3 years ago)