Canberra for the day

Leaving the house for the day with 12 people at 7:30 am is actually quite tricky so even though we had great intentions of heading out to Canberra early yesterday we didn't get away till closer to 9am.
We had three teens in the back of our corolla Josh was driving and we learned that the latest term for 'cool tunes' is now 'dank bops'. Who would have thought eh?! Esmae luckily has the taste in music we don't mind being exposed to (like the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Sting) so we had a happy ride with only one teen tuning out the music in preference to Justin Bieber and friends!

There was a bit of misunderstanding about what we were all wanting to do in Canberra. We had all agreed on going to see the national Australian Museum in the morning, then having lunch and then some of us thought we'd be hitting the shops while others thought that we should spend our town time going to a war museum. So as you can imagine when it was declared it was time for the afternoon museum encore there was a decent amount of debate/whining/arguing!

We managed to fit a little of everything in luckily - though the shop part was a little to short-lived for some teens in particular..

Canberra was beautiful! It's built around a big wide river with huge roads and many important looking head-quarters buildings. The national museum is over looking part of the river. The adults found it interesting but for children it was pretty boring. We are a bit spoilt in New Zealand with Te Papa being so big, interactive and engaging for children.
 It was quite informative but I thought there would be a lot more information on Australia's brutal past but it was only mentioned in small stories here and there. Maybe Australia is still feeling ashamed to admitting to the atrocities of their recent history..

We lunched in the park at the war museum with an impressive view of the huge road leading to the grand visage of the museum. We chose a sunny little spot on a circular concrete pad with a piece of marble art in the middle. After spreading out our lunch and using the art as a buffet table we noticed a guard wandering over to us. He kindly informed us that the art was actually a memorial and wasn't meant for eating off!  Oops...

Later on that evening we all went out for dinner to the Brinkman's favourite Asian style restaurant which is entirely vegan. There we chose over ten dishes to share from which were all 'meat' type dishes like satay chicken and roast duck etc. which were made from tofu or a mushroom type ingredient. It was super tasty and cheap too, although for me eating fake meat is a bit weird. Though last night I sure wasn't complaining about that!
At the vegan restaurant in Canberra

Road looking up to the War museum.

Looking down that same road towards Parliment


Looking out from the car over one of the many
beautiful river views

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