Canberra

I am in Melbourne now, but I spent Christmas in Canberra.

Canberra is the capitol of Australia. It is not in any of the states of Australia. It is in a special region called the Australian Capitol Territory. In that regard it is like Washington D.C.

Also, like D.C., Canberra is a “planned city”. As I discovered, that means that Canberra is very unfriendly to pedestrians!

Canberra hosts a number of museums and monuments. The map I had did not give a good sense of scale, so it appeared that some places were in a reasonable walking distance from my hotel. However, I discovered that the distances are quite far. I also discovered that the whole museum area is quite dead on a Saturday, and there are no services like restaurants around them.

I went to the War Museum on Saturday morning, and it was very nice. Before lunch, I figured I could stroll to an area that has a number of museums and art galleries, get some lunch, and look at some of the places. However, after a long trudge, I reached the area I was headed to, and discovered that it is just buildings and parking lots, and it looked very desolate. I was getting very hungry! I decided to just hop on a bus back towards my hotel, and the nearby shopping area, and forget about the “central” area! It just didn’t look like it was worth the effort of getting to it.

What is it about planned cities – like Canberra and the Pudong region of Shanghai – that makes them so awful?! Whatever parameters the “planners” are trying to optimize seem to be the wrong ones. The places seem to end up looking pretty, but being very impractical and unlivable spaces.

I stayed in an “apartment hotel” in Canberra. It had a small kitchenette. This was very nice for Christmas, since I could stock up on food, and not have to worry about all of the businesses being closed.