Adelaide History

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

Unless you enjoy seeing churches - all of which pale in comparison to the history and grandeur of the churches you will find in Europe - I'd probably give Adelaide a miss. There are far more enjoyable cities in Australia to visit, that aren't as far away from each other as this one.