Darwin by Hybrid - Day Two

Emmy and I had an early start this morning and were out of the hotel by 8.00am, which is unheard of for us, especially any combination involving Em. We walked up to the market, wandered around, had coffee, bought some things for lunch with a plan to eat them at the zoo.

I really like Adelaide market, in part because it reflects my broader perceptions of the city. It's an extremely neat, compact and well-ordered market with an obvious German influence. Pork can be found in many of its forms, mostly smoked and often fatty. We bought some double-smoked kassler to have as part of lunch and it was glorious. Charcuterie (or whatever the Germanic equivalent is) is also frequently blessed with humorous double-entendre names - Bung Fritz, Smoked Knobs - just fantastic.

Like many atheists, the only really convincing argument I've heard for the possibility of divine intervention is bacon. Surely, the logic goes, something SO perfect is proof that divine perfection is not only plausible, it is necessary to explain bacon, kassler, the German pork tradition and any number of glorious Vietnamese dishes that use every part of the pig except the squeal.

In any event, much pig was on display, and lo, I almost prayed.

After a longer-than-intended walk around the park around the Adelaide CBD, we went to the zoo at Emily's suggestion. We took our booty of kassler, a baguette, a soft cheese and a sheep's milk cheese rubbed in rosemary, some olives and muscatels. Yeah, life on holiday is real tough....

Adelaide reminds me a lot of Canberra, or rather that should be the other way around. In retrospect (after almost ten years in the ACT), Canberra looks in many ways like it was modelled on Adelaide. Adelaide's a pretty, low-rise city that's kept much of its late nineteenth century architecture, albeit on a smaller scale than the lavish, almost pompous gold-rush funded edifices of Melbourne, Ballarat and Bendigo, for example. Ordered without being sterile, pretty without being quaint, but also spread out that means there isn't a lot of concentrated activity.

A few hours lounging around the hotel reading, writing this and editing today's video, and soon we'll walk further up Gouger St to have dinner. And tomorrow we drive to Coober Pedy....

A link to today's video is here.