Canberra, Australia

Today, we had the whole day off from meetings! Our friend, Peter, who is a native of Australia but lived in the States for quite some time, picked us up and took us sightseeing along with his family. We started off by going to a hill that overlooks the whole of Canberra (I can’t remember the name of it). From this hill, it is evident that this city was built for a specific purpose and with a well-laid out plan from the beginning. Canberra has a population of a little over 300,000 and is the capital of Australia. One of the things that surprised me a bit as Peter was filling us in on the history of Canberra and Australia in general, is that Australia didn’t become an independent country until 1901. The picture of me, Lance, and Terri was taken at the lookout point with the next picture being the view from there. You can see the well designed boulevard that runs from the Parliament House to the Australian War Memorial.

We stopped by the War Memorial and visited the Hall of Memory. It’s a small hall that has mosaics and stained glass windows and is a memorial to the Australian casualties of war. The mosaics are from the 1950s and are made up of over 6 million cubed pieces of tile imported from Italy. It was quite impressive.

From there, we checked out the Parliament building and ate a surprisingly tasty lunch while there. Our next stop was back at the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS). We had meetings there all day yesterday, but today we went back with Peter’s family and did a little shopping at the visitor’s center and Lance tried his hand at the virtual sport exhibits. No body wanted to bust his bubble by telling him that the impressive speed he clocked with his throw of a “baseball” was actually in kilometers/hour and not miles/hour!!! The AIS covers a lot of area (65 hectare) and is undergoing quite a bit of construction at the moment. Unlike the U.S. Olympic Training Center, the AIS is government funded and enjoys wide national support. There were tons of visitors at the center the whole time we were there.

Our last site visit of the day was to Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve just outside of Canberra. Here we got to see lots of kangaroo out and about as well as a koala bear munching on eucalyptus leaves. There weren’t as many animals as in the past since the reserve is still recovering from forest fires in 2003. It was still a great way to end the day, though, and we were very grateful to Peter and his family for spending the whole day taking us sightseeing.

Tomorrow, we bid good-bye to Canberra and make our way back towards Sydney for a couple more meetings over the next few days. I’ll try to post again from there.

Kangaroo picture by Lance Williams and koala bear picture by Luke Davis.