Adelaide People & Culture

Considering that Adelaide is the capital of South Australia, I had expected a bustling metropolis packed with businessmen in suits rushing back and forth between meetings, and I was almost planning on moving on as soon as I got here. It just goes to prove that you should never jump to conclusions. I like Adelaide. I like it a lot. If it can be possible for a big city to retain the charm of small town Australia, Adelaide seems to be having a pretty good try - the day to day business seems to be hidden away behind the scenes where it's out of sight and mind, while the streets remain relaxed and, well, Australian. Everywhere I went as I wandered, I saw fountains with people sitting around on deckchairs listening to music playing in nearby bandstands, colourful markets full of equally colourful traders, or street entertainers striding about on stilts. It is also incredibly easy to find your way around as the city is built on the grid system familiar in Australia and North America, making it very hard to get lost. Trams trundle up and down taking people from place to place, the pedestrian malls are cobbled and full of atmosphere, and the Torrens River runs right through the city with both banks covered in parkland and wide grassy verges where people sit eating picnics and soaking up the sun. In fact, one of the things which sets Adelaide apart from other cities is the sheer amount of green space. And of course, Adelaide is home to the Australian Oval where they routinely practice thrashing us at Cricket. In other cities around the world, it almost seems as though there's a competition going on to see who can build the biggest skyscraper or the largest office block - and if anything inconvenient such as a tree should get in the way, then they just pull it up and pretend it never existed. In Adelaide, it's obvious from the moment you arrive that the buildings are secondary features and are built around a beautiful city of parks, gardens and rivers - how rare it is to see the environment being considered as part of the future. My guide book describes Adelaide as a city of wonders and possibilities, a city of art and festivals, and it's now obvious to me why people have been heading here from all over the country in the last few days for the national cycling event - the city is criss-crossed with cycling and walking trails running through the parklands and along the river, and it's a pleasure to get around by leg power rather than petrol. The reason for Adelaide's apparent wish to stick two fingers up at the accepted way of designing a city harks back to it's inception and design by William Light in 1836 as a River Town of public spaces, wide boulevards and surrounded by parkland - a place inspired by the then unusual concept of civil liberties, where people could relax and worship freely within the "City of Churches". Unbelievably, this wasn't initially a very popular idea - but thankfully Light went ahead anyway, people came around and not much has changed in Adelaide over the years. Neither is there any sign that anybody feels a need to start expanding all over the surrounding green belt as many cities have done in recent years.

You can read my full travel journals at http://www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer and http://www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer2

Open air shopping Malls in Australia all seem to be the same and most towns and cities have several. A pedestrianised street runs along a few blocks in the middle of the town and is lined with shops, cafes and restaurants. As there are no cars allowed, there's no need to cross the street or wait for the lights to change so you can spend a carefree afternoon just browsing, drinking or hanging out to watch other people browsing and drinking. More and more malls in Australia are adding wireless internet access, which means that it's also becoming increasingly common to see people sitting about on benches using their laptop and surfing the web, quite often for free. Rundle Mall in Adelaide is a large multi-storey undercover shopping centre, and is by far the largest I've seen for a while - in fact, it is considered by some to be the largest shopping precinct in Australia. Outside on the street, just in case you've got so caught up in the shopping and forgotten just how surreal Australia can be, visitors are welcomed by the sight of two giant stainless steel balls (The Mall's Balls) piled one on top of the other for no adequately explored reason. Inside, the place is huge - the entire ground floor is a food court selling every type of food imaginable, and above it are six floors containing every type of shop under the sun from supermarkets to sex shops. Next door is a smaller food court in which, when I returned here with Tanya in 2002, we spent virtually every day sitting and eating donuts and banana smoothies - something which vendors in Britain seem unable to make. Smoothies in Australia are generally made out of real fruit, and you can watch them stuff bananas into a blender and create the smoothie in front of you - in Britain, on the other hand, there seems to be a tendency to use banana flavour ice cream, which isn't quite the same thing. Adelaide is also famous for its statues. Wherever you go in the city, you'll find everything from statues recalling famous figures from Australian history to the bizarre street art that springs up everywhere. On the pedestrian precinct outside Rundle Mall, litter bins along the street are decorated with full size bronze statues of pigs standing on their hind legs and nosing through the rubbish, other bronze pigs just standing around waiting their turn. These pigs, I have learned since, all have names - Truffles, Horatio, Oliver and Augusta, should you wish to say Hello on your way through. Central Market is a large and diverse area of the city in which you can buy virtually anything you fancy to eat from the tons of speciality stalls selling anything from Cheese to Thai food. You can sit down to eat at a restaurant or scamper from stall to stall bargaining with the cheerful local vendors over vegetables you've never even heard of. The Market is surrounded by cafes, restaurants, fish and chip shops, and with Chinatown just around the corner you could easily spend your day browsing here and go straight on for a meal and a night out afterwards without having to go home in between.

You can read my full travel journals at http://www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer and http://www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer2

Haigh's chocolates, considered one of the oldest and finest chocolatiers in Australia, has a small shop in a corner of Rundle Mall and their main factory five minutes from the city centre. The factory runs tours for those with a chocolate fetish, although it isn't perhaps the easiest place to find if you're expecting a huge production centre with twelve foot high walls and guards on the gates - Tanya and I wandered up and down the street for some time in 2003, looking for the place, before we finally found it in an ordinary looking building at the front of a small trading estate. Inside, guests are offered tea and coffee and then shown around the facilities - as we passed windows onto the factory floor, workers dressed head to toe in protective clothing were emptying liquid chocolate into vats and pressing buttons. It was very modern and I was a little disappointed to not see people huddled around a table carving out intricate chocolate shapes by hand, but at the end of the tour we emerged into a giant shop containing more chocolate than it should be legal to have in one place - and all we could think about was stuffing our faces with samples.

You can read my full travel journals at http://www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer and http://www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer2

The only downside to my time in Adelaide was that I arrived on a Sunday and it was virtually impossible to get anything to drink. It seems to be very difficult to find a bar in Australia which opens on Sundays - As of a few years ago the shops all get to open for business from twelve until six, but they still insist on some very old fashioned drinking laws. It seems that the government have come up with a rule that actually makes it so much more expensive to sell alcohol on a Sunday that most places simply couldn't be bothered. It wasn't even supposed to be possible to use the hotel bar on Sunday - it cost me twice as much because of the Sunday Tax and they really didn't want to serve me, but I managed to persuade them by lying on the ground with my legs in the air and pointing at my mouth in an attempt to convince them that I'd had a long journey and was likely to die of dehydration at any moment. All the same, it was very obvious that they just wanted to clean up and go home - the waitress was bustling about with cleaning implements all the time I was there, stripping down the tables and stacking the chairs - so I only stayed for as long as I thought I could get away with and spent the rest of the evening at the cinema watching some more films I'd not known were coming. The woman at the box office didn't bother to issue me with a ticket of any kind, just waving me through after I'd paid - I could, in fact, have just walked straight through the doors as many other people were doing in order to buy popcorn inside, and nobody would've ever known that I hadn't paid to be there. The only person who questioned me in any way was the janitor who came in to clean the cinema while I was waiting for the film to start. He asked me if I'd paid, I said that I had, he gave me the thumbs-up sign and went about his business. Everybody must be honest in Australia.

You can read my full travel journals at http://www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer and http://www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer2

Festivals and food. Arts and culture. Shopping and sports. This is Adelaide - the city where there's always something on. Whether you want to party or relax, South Australia's capital has it all. With spacious boulevards and vibrant inner-city districts, sophisticated architecture and lush gardens, it's the perfect venue for all sorts of activities - big or small. You might want to immerse yourself in the culture of the city's North Terrace, with its museums and libraries. You might want to indulge in retail therapy at Rundle Mall, or sample the variety of tastes on offer at the famed Adelaide Central Market. Make sure you try a pie-floater while you're there. You might prefer to follow in the footsteps of sporting champions at the world-famous Adelaide Oval. Or enjoy a retreat to the cosmopolitan seaside suburbs of Glenelg and Brighton. In Adelaide, there is a brilliant blend of things to see and do. All you have to do is choose.

Considering that Adelaide is the capital of South Australia, I had expected a bustling metropolis packed with businessmen in suits rushing back and forth between meetings, and I was almost planning on moving on as soon as I got here. It just goes to prove that you should never jump to conclusions. I like Adelaide. I like it a lot. If it can be possible for a big city to retain the charm of small town Australia, Adelaide seems to be having a pretty good try - the day to day business seems to be hidden away behind the scenes where it's out of sight and mind, while the streets remain relaxed and, well, Australian. Everywhere I went as I wandered, I saw fountains with people sitting around on deckchairs listening to music playing in nearby bandstands, colourful markets full of equally colourful traders, or street entertainers striding about on stilts. It is also incredibly easy to find your way around as the city is built on the grid system familiar in Australia and North America, making it very hard to get lost. Trams trundle up and down taking people from place to place, the pedestrian malls are cobbled and full of atmosphere, and the Torrens River runs right through the city with both banks covered in parkland and wide grassy verges where people sit eating picnics and soaking up the sun. In fact, one of the things which sets Adelaide apart from other cities is the sheer amount of green space. And of course, Adelaide is home to the Australian Oval where they routinely practice thrashing us at Cricket. In other cities around the world, it almost seems as though there's a competition going on to see who can build the biggest skyscraper or the largest office block - and if anything inconvenient such as a tree should get in the way, then they just pull it up and pretend it never existed. In Adelaide, it's obvious from the moment you arrive that the buildings are secondary features and are built around a beautiful city of parks, gardens and rivers - how rare it is to see the environment being considered as part of the future. My guide book describes Adelaide as a city of wonders and possibilities, a city of art and festivals, and it's now obvious to me why people have been heading here from all over the country in the last few days for the national cycling event - the city is criss-crossed with cycling and walking trails running through the parklands and along the river, and it's a pleasure to get around by leg power rather than petrol. The reason for Adelaide's apparent wish to stick two fingers up at the accepted way of designing a city harks back to it's inception and design by William Light in 1836 as a River Town of public spaces, wide boulevards and surrounded by parkland - a place inspired by the then unusual concept of civil liberties, where people could relax and worship freely within the "City of Churches". Unbelievably, this wasn't initially a very popular idea - but thankfully Light went ahead anyway, people came around and not much has changed in Adelaide over the years. Neither is there any sign that anybody feels a need to start expanding all over the surrounding green belt as many cities have done in recent years.

You can read my full travel journals at http://www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer and http://www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer2

I've been in Adelaide for 5 moths and it became my second home! The first 3 weeks I stayed in Sunny's backpackers, which was a really nice small hostel very close to the city center. If you want a cheap but goor meal I would recommend the Edinburgh Castle, you can have a very big schintzel or nice salt and pepper squid for 10 dollars. It's also nice to sit in the beer garden and listen to some live music in there.

Festivals and food. Arts and culture. Shopping and sports. This is Adelaide - the city where there's always something on. Whether you want to party or relax, South Australia's capital has it all. With spacious boulevards and vibrant inner-city districts, sophisticated architecture and lush gardens, it's the perfect venue for all sorts of activities - big or small. You might want to immerse yourself in the culture of the city's North Terrace, with its museums and libraries. You might want to indulge in retail therapy at Rundle Mall, or sample the variety of tastes on offer at the famed Adelaide Central Market. Make sure you try a pie-floater while you're there. You might prefer to follow in the footsteps of sporting champions at the world-famous Adelaide Oval. Or enjoy a retreat to the cosmopolitan seaside suburbs of Glenelg and Brighton. In Adelaide, there is a brilliant blend of things to see and do. All you have to do is choose.

Open air shopping Malls in Australia all seem to be the same and most towns and cities have several. A pedestrianised street runs along a few blocks in the middle of the town and is lined with shops, cafes and restaurants. As there are no cars allowed, there's no need to cross the street or wait for the lights to change so you can spend a carefree afternoon just browsing, drinking or hanging out to watch other people browsing and drinking. More and more malls in Australia are adding wireless internet access, which means that it's also becoming increasingly common to see people sitting about on benches using their laptop and surfing the web, quite often for free. Rundle Mall in Adelaide is a large multi-storey undercover shopping centre, and is by far the largest I've seen for a while - in fact, it is considered by some to be the largest shopping precinct in Australia. Outside on the street, just in case you've got so caught up in the shopping and forgotten just how surreal Australia can be, visitors are welcomed by the sight of two giant stainless steel balls (The Mall's Balls) piled one on top of the other for no adequately explored reason. Inside, the place is huge - the entire ground floor is a food court selling every type of food imaginable, and above it are six floors containing every type of shop under the sun from supermarkets to sex shops. Next door is a smaller food court in which, when I returned here with Tanya in 2002, we spent virtually every day sitting and eating donuts and banana smoothies - something which vendors in Britain seem unable to make. Smoothies in Australia are generally made out of real fruit, and you can watch them stuff bananas into a blender and create the smoothie in front of you - in Britain, on the other hand, there seems to be a tendency to use banana flavour ice cream, which isn't quite the same thing. Adelaide is also famous for its statues. Wherever you go in the city, you'll find everything from statues recalling famous figures from Australian history to the bizarre street art that springs up everywhere. On the pedestrian precinct outside Rundle Mall, litter bins along the street are decorated with full size bronze statues of pigs standing on their hind legs and nosing through the rubbish, other bronze pigs just standing around waiting their turn. These pigs, I have learned since, all have names - Truffles, Horatio, Oliver and Augusta, should you wish to say Hello on your way through. Central Market is a large and diverse area of the city in which you can buy virtually anything you fancy to eat from the tons of speciality stalls selling anything from Cheese to Thai food. You can sit down to eat at a restaurant or scamper from stall to stall bargaining with the cheerful local vendors over vegetables you've never even heard of. The Market is surrounded by cafes, restaurants, fish and chip shops, and with Chinatown just around the corner you could easily spend your day browsing here and go straight on for a meal and a night out afterwards without having to go home in between.

You can read my full travel journals at http://www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer and http://www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer2

Hire a car and drive on the Great Ocean Road to Melbourne, or use the Grampian Mountains as a base to explore a new section of the Road each day.

Great wee place this we stayed at a little place called Macclesfield at a friends grandmothers place nestled in the trees. the bird life is incredible Galahs and colourful parrot things. Went to a little german town Hahndorf - such a pretty place. Shopping in Adelaide was great.

Must try a Pie Floater.....Aussie Meat Pie turned upside down in a bowl of pea soup...with tomato sauce....awesome!!!!

If you want to see great sunsets only 30 minutes from the city center, Henley beach is the place to go. On sunday nights Henley square is lit up and buskers/ entertainers/ musicians frequent it. Gormet food and bars are offered for great prices.

Beautiful city easy to get around due to grid like design.

The only downside to my time in Adelaide was that I arrived on a Sunday and it was virtually impossible to get anything to drink. It seems to be very difficult to find a bar in Australia which opens on Sundays - As of a few years ago the shops all get to open for business from twelve until six, but they still insist on some very old fashioned drinking laws. It seems that the government have come up with a rule that actually makes it so much more expensive to sell alcohol on a Sunday that most places simply couldn't be bothered. It wasn't even supposed to be possible to use the hotel bar on Sunday - it cost me twice as much because of the Sunday Tax and they really didn't want to serve me, but I managed to persuade them by lying on the ground with my legs in the air and pointing at my mouth in an attempt to convince them that I'd had a long journey and was likely to die of dehydration at any moment. All the same, it was very obvious that they just wanted to clean up and go home - the waitress was bustling about with cleaning implements all the time I was there, stripping down the tables and stacking the chairs - so I only stayed for as long as I thought I could get away with and spent the rest of the evening at the cinema watching some more films I'd not known were coming. The woman at the box office didn't bother to issue me with a ticket of any kind, just waving me through after I'd paid - I could, in fact, have just walked straight through the doors as many other people were doing in order to buy popcorn inside, and nobody would've ever known that I hadn't paid to be there. The only person who questioned me in any way was the janitor who came in to clean the cinema while I was waiting for the film to start. He asked me if I'd paid, I said that I had, he gave me the thumbs-up sign and went about his business. Everybody must be honest in Australia.

You can read my full travel journals at http://www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer and http://www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer2