Canberra

[You have my permission to skip this first part if you majored in Politics or Geography or you live here, or you're smarter than a 5th grader...]

**Canberra is the Washington, DC of Australia. It is the capital, and it is it's own territory, known as ACT or Australian Capital Territory. It is a result of Sydney and Melbourne fighting to become the capital, and neither city giving in. ACT was born in 1901. It sits on previously inhabited Aboriginal tribe lands (there's evidence that the indigenous people were there for over 21,000 years) . That is another conflict altogether. The government people named it Canberra (pronounced CAM bra) from the Aboriginal word meaning "gathering place." Parliament lives here, the foreign embassies are here, some museums, and very little else are here.**the drive to Canberra--not unlike the drive from Provo to St. George, minus the mountains, plus lots of sheep

Anyway, Canberra hosts an annual spring tulip festival, Floriade. (Matt kept asking if it was a dental convention...) This was my main motivation for planning to go at this time. I decided we should drive the 3 hours to Canberra, and enjoy 2 days educating ourselves about the government and history of our (temporary) homeland, and see the spectacular tulips.

Here's what we did (and I'm pretty sure we did IT ALL in Canberra, and still had time to spare...)

Cockington Greens: This was fun. Somebody created these miniature gardens complete with houses and other buildings (built to scale) mostly found in the UK. They also had international buildings. Just look at the photos. I can't explain.

Zach loved this one from the Ukraine. He has a very favorite friend at school that is from the Ukraine, so this photo's for Valerye.
Matt is so cultural... seeing this mini Stonehenge sparks feelings of Spinal Tap love rather than moments of pondering ancient feats of engineering.

Aubrye was totally in her element here, despite all the destruct-o 4 year olds around her. She has always loved doll houses. Setting them up, getting all the furniture just right and all the accessories coordinated. This play area had at least a dozen different houses/schools/car garages/churches... We gave her about 15 minutes, then had to move on.

Australian Institute of Sport: Several years ago, Australia came home from the Olympics empty handed. No medals. So, government decided it was time to do something about it. They added a new emphasis on sport in the primary schools. They selected gifted athletes and brought them here to receive proper training. The next Olympics, there were medals won. Aussies' love of Sport really took off from there! Anyway, this seemed like a cool place to visit, but really, if you've been around the RB and the Smith Fieldhouse, that pretty much covers it. It could be that all the athletes are still on holiday after Beijing...who knows. At one point, Matt said, "Man, this place is a ghost town." To which Bryson replied "What do you mean? It's nothing like Scooby Doo's ghost town!" We ate a cruddy lunch here and moved on.

Floriade: Lots and lots of tulips and other spring flowers grown in patterns to create a picture. For some reason, we bought tickets for nightfest, so we could really only see the flowers for like 20 minutes, and then the sun went down. I wished we could've seen more of the garden gnome collection. We ate a cruddy dinner on the ground and watched short animated films on a giant movie screen. I learned that nightfest go-ers are more of the wine-tasting variety, and less of the 4 kids variety. We headed back to the hotel, and settled in for a lovely night's sleep.

my personal favorite tulip--the orange/yellow
some gnomes-painted to look like the Wiggles.

A few hours into my sleep, some obnoxious alarm goes off. I tell myself I can sleep through it if I try hard enough. It doesn't work, so I send Matt to figure out what it is, and make it stop. He fumbles around with no success, and tries to come back to bed. Then this voice starts "EVACUATE THE BUILDING AS DIRECTED. EVACUATE THE BUILDING AS DIRECTED. EVACUATE THE BUILDING AS DIRECTED..." What the? Before I know it, he's dressed & waking up the kids. I grab the diaper bag & Taylor, and we head down the fire escape. (At this point, I'm really annoyed to be awake, and to have every one of my kids awake with me; Matt is thinking of alternative places we could sleep. I can assure you, HE is the one you want around in an emergency. NOT me.)

SO we wait around awhile (20 minutes? not sure) with a bunch of other dazed folks until the fire marshall says...

"Just some burnt toast. You're free to return to your rooms."

You better hope I never find out who burnt toast that bad at 1 or 2 or 3am, whatever time it was. Back to bed we go, although Tay is ready to party...

Questacon Science & Technology Center: fun, hands-on learning, death drop, testing gravity, simulated earthquakes, air pressure, centrifugal force, light, sound...essentially pushing lots of buttons and stuff. Ironically, my camera stopped working here--just after Matt took this lovely video of me. (Let me just thank my mom and dad for all those years of gymnastics--I still point my toes when I'm hanging from a bar, ready to free fall.)

National Library: this was like 1/10th the size of the BYU library. And, for no apparent reason, the floors with the original architect's renderings of the Sydney Opera House, and the Magna Carta were closed.

Old Parliament House: Now that they built a "new" Parliament House, this one's a museum. The kids searched for clues around the offices and sat in the chairs where the House and Senate used to meet.

War Memorial: This was really cool. I think it would've been the highlight for me, it's just that we'd already O.D.'d on museums and history. But, the kids enjoyed getting in a real helicopter and submarine, and pushing more buttons.