Adelaide

In April 2001 there was something of an airline crisis in Australia.  First Ansett had their planes grounded due to safety problems, then there were headlines of bits falling off Qantas planes.  It was like the British Rail network with wings.  So Caro and I sensibly decided to fly Virgin Blue out of Sydney.  This was due to their very high standards of professionalism and safety.  Also they were very cheap.
 
But you know, they were really GOOD too!  We were dead impressed with the informal attitude of the crew and stewards who were introduced over the tannoy as follows:
 
"This is Tony; he used to be an exotic dancer and ex-porn star before he came to work for Virgin Blue.  This is Kylie, who has a serious addiction problem and will be coming around with drinks later."
 
And on encountering turbulence:
 
"You'll have to excuse our pilot; he hasn't passed his test yet."

Flying over Australia, you can't help but notice, well - how brown it all is.  How barren.  But the weird thing I noticed was that how the country is still divided up into sections, like the green patchwork that is the English countryside, only all scorched and brown.  It's like the fields down there are entirely grass-free and made up entirely of dirt.  Now I'm no farmer but I don't see what you could possibly grow off of a brown field.  Other than more dirt.  But what do I know?
 
The other thing about Australia that impresses is its size.  When you fly from Sydney to Adelaide you are moving across a continent.  For some reason, that had never occurred to me before.  I mean, it’s all the same country, right?   This just seems odd to we Europeans, who feel that if you are going to travel for that long, then you should be encountering different languages, different cultures and several types of silly hat.

Australia just isn’t like that – you fly and you fly and you fly, and when you land it’s still full of people wearing shorts, surfing and listening to AC/DC.  My small-island shaped brain had difficulty coping with this, but eventually we touched down.  ("We thank you for flying Virgin Blue and giving us this opportunity to take you for a ride".)
 
We were picked up at the airport by a lass from Lancaster who was working at Backpack Oz in Adelaide.  She loved the city and gave us a bit of a guided tour.  Adelaide is a city of huge great streets, crisscrossed by a tram, with lots of very impressive colonial-era, pseudo-European churches everywhere.  Everyone had told us that it was a place we ought to visit, although in fact we were there only as a jumping off point to Kangaroo Island.
 
Backpack Oz was a really pleasant surprise after the rather miserable surroundings of Eva's Backpackers in Sydney.  It was light and airy, nicely decorated, clean, but best of all, it had a friendly vibe.  I believe these things cascade down from the staff, whereas they had barely grunted at us in Sydney, the staff at Backpack Oz couldn't do enough for us.
 
Over the next couple of days we wandered around Adelaide, and discovered one or two things. 
 
1.  The streets of Adelaide are long and wide, but there's not much of interest in them.
2.  It takes AGES to get from the shops to the restaurants as they're all in different areas.  Mind you, at least Adelaide has a pretty good gas-powered free bus service, that was clean and easy to use. Quite frankly I think every city everywhere should have a service like this - and to pay for it we could double the price of road tax and triple the VAT on petrol - that would sort out those bloody deathmobile junkies that clog up our roads hahahahahahaaaa!!! (Sorry - lifelong pedestrian rant there.)
3.  There aren't half a lot of junkies about.
 
So we wandered around the shopping centre of Adelaide and went to see "Dude, Where's My Car?" which was so shitty that I felt embarrassed about laughing quite so hard at it.  I have low standards and am easily amused by poo.  You might have noticed.  
 
The shopping in Adelaide isn't terribly exciting although they did have a really cool, colonial style arcade where you could get a decent lunch and root around in the 2nd hand bookshops.  We also spotted the Singing Doll Guy.  Apparently he goes to Edinburgh for the festival (Caro had seen him before) but I'd never come across him and found his act BIZARRE.  Basically he controls a little box full of Barbies, Cindys and Action Men all decked up in evening clothes, whose mouths open and close in time to Show Tunes.  There were CROWDS of people stood around to witness the spectacle of

Action Man kicking his leg in time to "Aquarius" and "What the World Needs Now Is Love".  In front of the Singing Doll guy was a box full of change, together with a sign saying "Please Support Single Parent
Barbie" next to a doll with a rather obvious lump.  This is the sort of entertainment Australians LOVE.  A bit kitsch.  A bit camp.  A bit crap.