Day 4 - Adelaide

I slept horribly, but I slept in a bed and that is what counts. My internal clock woke me up at about 4 a.m. so I tried sleeping until I couldn’t anymore. Around 5:45 I got up and decided to connect to the internet and upload the first few entries of my blog.

Staying connected has been harder than I thought it would be. It seems in Australia free wifi isn’t as prolific as it is in Canada. Man, we’ve got it made and it’s cheap. I had to pay for one day of service at the hotel room, it cost $27.00 and I only had 100 megs of bandwidth.

Today we met my Dad’s cousin Franca, who has lived in Adelaide all her life and visited my family in Canada once when I was 7-years-old. She showed us around Adelaide, a beautiful but small city and one of the first cities in the world to be designed by an urban planner. It has many parks and public spaces, and all of it beautiful. The climate is hot and dry, the average temperature in the summer months is over 30 degrees celcius and it only goes down to 5 degrees during the winter.

Our hotel was located in a great spot, close to shopping and most of the major city attractions. We began by walking through the shopping district with many trendy stores that you just don’t see in North America. There is a huge outdoor mall that is roughly the size of four city blocks, we ate lunch at the food court there.

We then made our way to the Botanic Garden, which had many plants and trees from all over Africa and Australia. I was pleased to see so many tropical birds like cockatoos and colourful parakeets, flying in wild flocks from tree to tree. They are not afraid of people so Pierre got a chance to get right up close and take a picture of a cute pair of birds.

We finished off by visiting the Australian Wine Centre which had information about the wine making process and the different wineries located all over Australia.

That evening we were invited to Franca’s sister’s house for dinner, it was delicious. It was surprising to see how little difference there is between Italians in Montreal and Italians in Adelaide. Except for an accent, the customs and attitudes are exactly the same.