Pssst

We came back to Moss Vale yesterday, to spend the last week of our vacation at Mum & Dad's house. This is the last time we'll ever stay at No. 3 Price Street, and we're trying to savor the details. One detail is that there's no wireless here and Dad's desktop is at an almost dial-up situation, so I'll add more photos next week. Until then...

 Parliament House

 No flash photography at the Magna Carta

 
Today we took a field trip to Canberra, the capital of Australia. We had great fun visiting Parliament House because Parliament was actually in session and we got to sit in the peanut gallery of both the Senate and the House of Representatives (no Lords and Commons here). In the House, we heard the useless Prime Minister ramble on about nothing at all and yet still manage to keep talking in an almost convincing way, if you weren't actually paying attention, and we saw the Boxes and the Mace.

But the real show was in the Senate, where they were doing something called "Questions without Notice," where someone can present a question and call on a particular Minister to answer the question, pop quiz style, but in a this is the issue, what're you going to do about it kind of way. This one particular Minister stood up to talk and went on at some considerable length about how he'd recently spent an hour with this leader of Israel and an hour with this leader of Isreal, etc, etc, ad nauseum. It was marvelous to see how the Ministers from the other party hollered and heckled him. "Well it's good to know you're so bloody important!" "Offer you a cup o' tea, did they?" "You're not answering the question!" Even his own party told him to sit down when he talked past his allotted time. Fun to watch. And I guess I'm just a design nerd, because I really liked how the Senate was decorated in an ombre pattern where the rows of seats went from dark to light.

We saw the Magna Carta, too (one of them, anyway). 

Then we went to the Australian War Memorial. I've been to both Parliament House and the War Memorial before, but it was a better trip this time. It's a really great War Memorial with an entire floor devoted to WWI and an entire floor to WWII (we didn't have time for Korea or Vietnam so I can't comment there). CQH was very interested in WWI nurses -- I think she liked the uniforms -- and it just so happens that Mum has her great aunt's WWI nurses uniform. We'll be looking at that tomorrow, and perhaps taking it off her hands, which could be rather neat.

The Memorial is a "poppy memorial," because poppies were given for and represented the fallen in WWI. We looked for and found our relatives, Charles and Samuel Jude, who both died in WWI, and put a poppy on their names in the Roll of Honour. It always puts a thickness in my throat! Something else that never fails to do that is bagpipes -- I'm so Scottish, it's like genetic memory -- and an old piper in full regalia was there to close the Memorial for the night. I turned around afterwards to find LBH all teary. Every single time, both of us.

During the day, we bought EBH a beverage -- a Schwepps lemonade, which is kind of like Sprite -- and when she opened the bottle, the carbonation hissed at her. She exclaimed in her typically loud and joyful voice, "My lemonade loves me!" I asked her if she meant that she loved her lemonade. She said, "No, it loves me! It pssst at me, just like you do when you say 'Pssst, I love you!'"