Adelaide 2023

[Originally sent as email travelogue, Saturday, March 4, 9:04 pm Australian Central Daylight Time; Saturday, March 4, 2:04 am Pacific Standard Time.] Monday, February 27 We wasted little time getting to Kangaroo Island the first day we arrived in the Australian state of South Australia, but it still meant flying into the Adelaide airport from Sydney—Adelaide is the smallest of Australia's five cities with a metropolitan population of over 1 million, and in this case barely: Adelaide is 1.4 million. It's the only city even close to its size in South Australia, with the state's second largest city being Gawler, with just under 29,000 people. Even that is quite close, all of 27 miles or so northeast of Adelaide. (Third largest is Mount Gambier, population ~27,000, 270 miles southeast of Adelaide and near the state line with Victoria. Incidentally, Mount Gambier is also where Uncle David's wife, Mary Ann, was born.) But! Absolutely none of this has to do with the photo above, which was taken on the flight from Sydney to Adelaide. This flight just happened to coincide with the airing of the SAG Awards, for which Shobhit gets to vote, and we were able to watch about 45 minutes of it. For the first time ever, Netflix had the rights to the telecast and they streamed it via their YouTube channel—starting at noon our time Monday, which was 5pm Sunday, Pacific Time at home. We'd never have been able to watch them at all if not for them streaming on YouTube—and wifi being one of the several things we get for free on Australian domestic flights that no American domestic flights ever just hand over.

It should surprise no one that I take countless photos of tall buildings in any and every city I am in, which means Adelaide is no exception. Still, as it happened, the best panoramic view I ever got this visit of the entire Adelaide skyline was from the airport.

Wednesday, March 1 Fast-forward two days later—after our two-day trip to Kangaroo Island, about which I sent my previous email—and, having seen all the major attractions we wanted to see there, we managed to get rebooked on an earlier ferry back to the South Australian mainland. This change is entirely the reason we had the time to visit an Adelaide suburb called McLaren Vale, in which is located the d'Arenberg Cube at the d'Arenberg Winery. This was the one stop that actually came as a suggestion via Shobhit: he works for Total Wine & More, and when he spoke to a coworker about all the places in Australia we'd be visiting, the coworker suggested the d'Arenberg Cube as a stop in Adelaide. We all found it well worth stopping in.

d'Arenberg Cube closes at 4:30, and we got there right around 4:00. The cube is also currently hosting a Salvador Dali exhibit, which I think we all would have enjoyed, but there was no time for both that and a wine tasting. Shobhit paid for entry for all four of us, even though Uncle David does not drink. (Shobhit, being the insufferable person he is, tried to convince our pourer to pour for Uncle David so he could just drink the wine himself, but they apparently have strict limits on how much they can allow any one of us to drink.) Shobhit, Mary Ann and I all chose a different one of the four flights offered, and Shobhit and I shared each of the pours for each of our flights. In the above shot, the young woman who poured for us shows us on a local map where a given wine's grapes are grown—I wanted mine to be the flight that focused more on local wineries.

Uncle David, being the only one among us not drinking, wandered off to use the bathroom, which was on the ground floor while our wine tasting was on the top, fourth floor (great views). He was gone a while and we began to wonder if he'd gotten lost. He came back and then told us we had to see the men's room. We did so on our way out after the tasting was over, and now I understood why, when I Googled "d'Arenberg Cube," one of the suggested auto-completes was "d'Arenberg Cube toilets." This bathroom was a bit of a Wonderland experience, with ceramic faces whose giant mouths you pee into for urinals; toilet stalls obscured by foliage-covered cylindrical doors; and inside the toilet stall I used, even a mural of the Grim Reaper drinking wine. In the end I felt this bathroom alone was worth the price of admission.

From McLaren Vale, Mary Ann drove us all into the central business district of Adelaide, where Shobhit and I booked what was easily the best of the hotel rooms we had booked for this trip thus far—not nearly as high as the 24th-floor room we'd gotten in Sydney, but with a far better view on the 15th floor. It's an extended-stay room rental place, where people can pay anywhere from nightly to monthly, and we stayed three nights. Again, the main appeal was the kitchen, but when I saw a photo of the potential view on Hotels.com, I was all about it. I had emailed all of our hotels to see if we could get the highest floor possible, and iStay Precinct Adelaide really came through on this request: we were told at checkin that all the units on the top three floors are privately owned, which meant that while we had been booked on floor 15, it was indeed the highest floor available.

And not only was the view fantastic, but it was seen outside a glass-encased patio, with giant windows that open quite wide for fresh air—without even screens on them, which I found kind of stunning. Protip for anyone looking for a dramatic suicide in Adelaide! We ate several of our meals out on this patio. Also, the above view would be straight west out of the window; this angle is basically looking northwest; turning to the right, there was a lovely northward view of that end of Adelaide's skyline.

Thursday, March 2 On Thursday, Shobhit and I did a lot of walking—the most of any day this entire trip, in fact, falling just short of 30,000 steps for the day. According to our health tracker apps, that was just over 14 miles of walking for the day. Have I ever even walked that far in a single day before? I have no idea, maybe not! I can tell you I was sure glad I wore my shoes instead of my sandals that day. Anyway, our intent was to try walking around the massive Adelaide Parklands that surround all of the city center, but we walked around a bit inside the city center first. We wound up walking inside Adelaide City Hall, and found it shockingly accessible, one guy even opening the second-floor door out to the balcony for us. In this case we walked out onto the balcony for an auditorium in which they were clearly preparing for some upcoming event.

There had been several things I was interested in seeing in the City of Adelaide even when we last visited, in 2020, but many of them that year we didn't have time to get to. Since this time we stayed in a hotel in the central business district (CBD), it gave us a lot of opportunity to check out things we didn't previously get to see—or, I suppose, things I didn't get to see; I was the only one with any real agenda, aside from Shobhit suggesting we visit the d'Arenberg Cube. Anyway. On my list yet again: Rundle Mall, which is a pretty basic outdoor pedestrian-only street that also functions as a mall. What sets this one apart, however, is its really fun public art pieces, which were the reason I wanted to go there: the pigs rummaging through garbage, which have been there since 1999; a giant cubist metalic pigeon that was just unveiled in late 2020 (so that one wasn't even there yet when we last visited); or the evident centerpiece, The Spheres, a 13-ft (4 meter) tall stack of two silver spheres which were donated to the City of Adelaide in 1977 by the Hindmarsh Building Society to mark their centennary (only to wind up merging with Adelaide Bank in 1994, ha!), but locals apparently call them "the Mall's Balls." There are several other art pieces in the mall as well, but these three seem to be the biggest attractors.

Shobhit and I had this grand idea to walk the entire circumference of the Adelaide Parklands, but I don't think we realized how huge they really are. First of all, there's an interesting and key difference between how cities are organized in Australia versus in the U.S., in that "suburbs" in the U.S. are incorporated but separate cities that surround the center citiy of a given metropolitan area. In Australia, typically only the central business district, or the city center, is considered "the city," and it serves as its own "local government area" as they call them. What we might consider established neighborhood boundaries surrounding a Downtown, Australians already categorize as "suburbs." As in, as soon as you're outside of Downtown, you're already in a suburb. These kinds of differences in how cities are organized is why whenever you see a list of largest cities in the world, the only population figure you will see is the metropolitan population. By this standard, even though the "City of Seattle" has a population of roughly 734,000, Seattle actually has a population of about 4 million. Adelaide, on the other hand, has about 1.4 million, making it more comparable in the States to, say, Memphis, Tennessee. In Adelaide, though, the strict "City of Adelaide" is what is inside the Adelaide Parklands: the main city center, which is roughly one square mile; plus a smaller bit to the north called North Adelaide. Parklands also cut across in between North Adelaide and "the square mile," so the Adelaide Parklands make a kind of warped figure eight, inside of which the local government area of the "City of Adelaide" has a population of about 25,000. (Point of comparison: Downtown Seattle's population is about 65,000.)

Admittedly Adelaide would never be high on my list of Australian destinations if my uncle didn't live there, but I have very much enjoyed learning about it because he does—it's the only major Australian city, for example, that was formed by free settlers with no association with convicts, and was long called the "City of Churches" due to its diversity of faiths and freedom of religion. The Adelaide Parklands, as it happens, are now easily my favorite example of city planning that I have encountered anywhere in Australia; I really love it as a concept, as it includes an average 0.4-mile barrier of parkland between the city center and the surrounding suburbs, and they combine to a total 1,878 acres, or just under three square miles. Shobhit and I kind of didn't think about the fact that any walk all the way around "the square mile" through the middle of these parklands would be notably larger than one square mile, plus we followed what was labeled as the "Parklands Trail," which zigzagged a lot and therefore added a fair amount to the distance (its entire loop distance is 19.5 km, or just over 12 miles). In the end, after walking from our hotel to Victoria Square, the park in the very center of the square mile, then up to Rundle Mall, and then due west to the Parklands, we only managed to walk through roughly the southwest quadrant of the Adelaide Parklands, and still we made it through six of the total 29 numbered parks, and by the time we got back to our hotel the walk had exceeded eight miles. (By the end of that day, our Health app tracker said we'd walked more than 14 miles.) One last tidbit about the Adelaide Parklands: they each have two names, one English and one aboriginal. The Parklands we managed to walk through included Gladys Elphick Park / Narnungga (Park 25); Ellis Park / Tampawardli (Park 24); G S Kingston Park / Wirrarninthi (Park 23); Josie Agius Park / Wikaparntu Wirra (Park 22); Golden Wattle Park / Mirnu Wirra (Park 21W); Veale Park / Walyu Yarta (Park 21); and Blue Gum Park / Kurangga (Park 20). I suppose if we ever visit Adelaide again, we'll have plenty more Parklands to walk through.

While we were at Rundle Mall, we happened to walk into a chocolate shop called Haigh's Chocolates, having no idea it was an Australian chain started and still based in Adelaide, and the young lady there told us that store was their first. She also told us they have a factory just south of the city center, and that location then became our destination after walking through a quarter of the Parklands. We were told they offer free factory tours, and although she said we needed to call to book a spot, we took a risk and decided to see if they had any space on the next tour once we got there—and they did. The tour was a lot like the factory tours you can take at Theo Chocolates in Seattle, which Shobhit told our tour guide about and which she said she was going to look up. One key difference was they did not allow any photography on this tour. But, we could take pictures out in the shop. This was also when I learned about Australia's “Easter Bilby,” using an endangered Australian native marsupial as a holiday symbol instead of the non-native, invasive bunny. I loved this concept, and bought one of their chocolate Easter Bilbies largely because it was also the only product currently on their store shelves made exclusively from cocoa beans grown in Australia. It was a little pricey, but I wanted to support everything about this. (Shobhit still gathered more than $70 worth of chocolate to buy there anyway.) I'm back in Sydney again as I write this, and it's been two days since I bought the chocolate bilby, and I figured it was high time I tried it. This isn't a collectible action figure, I'm not going to save it. I bit its ears off, and . . . honestly? Not that special. So I bit its fucking face off!

When we visited Adelaide in 2020, Uncle David was pretty adamant that we experience Adelaide Fringe, the world's second-largest fringe festival after Edinburgh Fringe. Uncle David's basic contention was that we simply could not be in Adelaide during its fringe festival and not experience it. And so, we did: in 2020, we attended three ticketed shows (two live performances, one an Aboriginal art installation), which included a singing group called Choir of Man, which had made a huge splash at their festival debut in 2018; Uncle David and Mary Ann were thus convinced to see them in 2019; and they then convinced us to see it with them when we were there in 2020. We did only two ticketed shows this year, but I had enjoyed Choir of Man so much last time that I wanted one of the shows to be that one again. Uncle David and Mary Ann were happy to see them even a third time, and Shobhit even seemed to enjoy the show a lot more this time than he had in 2020 (though I think he enjoyed it then too). The basic concept is very not-Matthew, in that it's a bunch of men on a set meant to be a British or Irish pub, each one of them a somewhat stock pub "character," I suppose a spin on Cheers. The songs they sing are nearly all harmonized covers of popular pop songs, from "Chandelier" by Sia (Uncle David's favorite, as sung by Choir of Man),to "Hello" by Adele. I really thought they had some new songs this time around, but I just checked the track list from their CD copyrighted 2018 and it appears to be the exact same set list. Oh well! E,ven one of the guys is briefly revealed to be a gay man, which I don't remember from before either but I'm guessing now that it was the same. Whatever, I had a blast at the show both times! After Uncle David and Mary Ann left us to do our exploring on our own through the morning and afternoon, they took the train up from their suburb of Morphett Vale to see two Fringe shows with us, the other one a very funny improv comedy show.

Friday, March 3 We didn't do nearly as much walking on Friday as we did on Thursday, but we still did a bit: 6.77 miles total. This included the three other, smaller parks inside the "square mile" that we hadn't been able to get to the day before, plus some extra time in the Veale Gardens section of Adelaide Parklands' Veale Park / Walyu Yarta (Park 21), which included a rose garden.

We then made our way up to the Adelaide Botanic Garden, where I had one last Fringe Festival thing to check out: "Seeing the Invisible," an art program actually partnering with several gardens around the world, which involves downloading an app and then viewing "augmented reality" virtual artwork through the phone's camera. Shobhit did not realize what's what this was, and once he finally understood, he immediately lost interest, shortly afterwards complaining about how something like this is of no use to older people with little understanding of the technology (subtext: Shobhit is old) and therefore unnecessarily excludes a large segment of the population. I'm not sure how the people who put this together should have done it differently, and I found it interesting. But, to be somewhat fair to Shobhit, the app took a gigantic amount of memory; it took an eternity to download; and its usage was anything but intuitive, making it take a while to figure out. I managed to get screenshots of about five of the virtual art pieces before I was fine with just moving on.

Shobhit and I then walked westward along North Tce road, the northern border of "the square mile," which is lined with a lot of government buildings, including the University of Adelaide. In this particular shot, you see both Adelaide's tallest building, "Frome Central Tower One" (2019, 452 ft / 138 meters, 37 floors) which also houses the Crowne Plaza Hotel. Directy to the right of it stands Adelaide's 5th-tallest building, Yugo Tower (2021, 287 ft / 118 meters, 35 floors), which I just learned from Wikipedia was built for student accommodation.

We then meandered past the Art Gallery of South Australia, which we quickly learned is free! Well, except for the temporary Andy Warhol exhibit, which would have been fun to see but it was expensive so screw that. The free stuff had a lot of very cool art in it anyway. Can you find me in this picture?

Another one I long wanted to see and finally got to: the Mortlock Wing of the State Library of South Australia, which is regularly put on lists of the most beautiful libraries in the world. This one has a lot of local historical displays on the lower floor, but you take the elevator one floor up and you'll find the walls packed with really old books, some of the shelving creating cubbies with tables flanked by half-walls for people to hang out in. Shobhit had to comment more than once, to both library staff and later to Uncle David and Mary Ann, that all but one of the people we saw sitting at tables in there had no real book in their hands at all, but rather were on their laptops or mobile devices and using the free wifi. And I'm just like: so? Libraries have long been evolving into public resources for far more than just books. Still: seeing all those really old books was really cool. I pulled three of them in turn randomly off the shelves, hoping to find a particularly old one. The first was published in the fifties, the second in the sixties; both were pretty worn and tattered. But not old enough! I hit an amusing kind of jackpot with the third one I pulled out, a book called Education by Violence, which was published in 1918.

Next stop: Shobhit wanted to do some local produce shopping at Adelaide Central Market, basically their version of Seattle's Pike Place Market. Theirs has been around since 1869, quite a bit earlier than Pike Place Market's opening in 1907. This market has many aisles and vendors and we walked them all, largely because Shobhit wanted to add to his step count. We also bought a few things, and the most amusing thing I saw was this display of American products which included a box of Lucky Charms and boxes of Mike and Ike's candies. Oooh, exciting!

When we finished with Adelaide Fringe on Thursday night, for a moment it seemed Uncle David and Mary Ann would just leave Friday entirely to us to spend on our own—they were very intimidated by all the walking we told them about, although of course we never would have asked them to walk so much. I was very bummed by the idea of being in town a whole day more and not seeing them, so I suggested we get together for dinner, and they agreed to that. They even picked us up and drove us into North Adelaide to a Himalayan restaurant they chose but had never been to, largely for its location in a part of town where parking would be easier—there are no street meters there! Anyway, the dinner turned out to be truly fantastic. Afterward, they drove us back to our hotel at iStay Precinct, where we wanted to show them our fantastic, 15th-floor room. And on the way back, we once again passed Victoria Square, the park in the city that serves as its central focal point. I got this shot out the backseat window while we were waiting at a traffic light, the two directions of King William Street divided by the park, so the car was kind of right next to it. I don't even remember this from when Shobhit and I walked through in daylight and still don't know what we were looking at exactly, but I thought it still made for a quite lovely photo.

And finally, we took Uncle David and Mary Ann up to our iStay Precinct hotel room, and they were duly impressed. We finally gave our hugs and said our goodbyes, having no clue when we will see each other again—but just before they left, I asked to get one photo of just the two of them together. At first they were just standing in front of the wall, the entry hallway serving as the background, and Shobhit quite sensibly suggested they stand out on the patio with the 15th-floor view of Adelaide behind them. Just as I had before we went to Australia in 2020, I upgraded my iPhone just before this trip, and the nighttime photo capability is much improved from even what I had found impressive in 2020. We turned the overhead light off in the patio area for this shot, so there would be no reflection in the windows. My phone still focused on them fantastically, and I think this may very well be one of the best shots of the two of them ever taken. I am unendingly grateful for the ability to have taken this trip out there, and for the time we got with them. I've had a truly wonderful time. And the Australia adventures aren't even over yet! I mean, they may be by the time I have the time to write the next travelogue, but as I write this, I guess we'll all just wait in suspense for a while. (Click here for next travelogue: Sydney 2023)