Ridin'Ard

After sleeping for literally 12 hrs, we woke up hungry AF and went to bkst. Julie got avocado toast in the land that invented it and Jaron got chili scrambled eggs. Delicious. 

Monday was Jaron’s “rest day” aka jet lag day and we went to the Australian National Library, starting with their free tour at 11:00. 

Here are the old pneumatic tubes that they used to use to send book pull requests. 

And here are the robots who do book pull requests now. 

Books! 

Just doing some personal scoping out of things I need to find for my library. 

This is one of Captain (then Lt) Cook’s surveys of Australia. 

And this is his journal! 

Next up was the Old Parliament House which houses the Museum of Australian Democracy. We took a tour here, too, and learned about the “Washminster” method of government the Aussies adopted from elements of both American and British democracy. 

This is the original senate chamber. You can tell bc it’s red. 

This is the outside of the Old Parliament House. 

Turn 180 degrees and here is the (new) Parliament House. They moved to a new building bc the population increase necessitated an increase in the number of representatives. 

Closeup of the Australian coat of arms. Not the British coat of arms. So Australia is a constitutional monarchy that is still technically under the British monarchy. They had a diplomatic separation in 1901 and there have been small steps towards independence here and there, but their head of state is still the British monarch. 

Whaddaya know? There was a tour at 3:30. So we took another one. 

The House of Representatives chamber. You can tell bc it’s green. 

Back to the hotel in the rain. We took public transportation today. They are switching to a new payment system and it’s free during this transition which started on 9/20. So that’s lucky for us. 

We got ramen for dinner (not pictured). It was amazeballs. We are really getting screwed on ramen in the US. This ramen was more substantial in every way. Thicker seaweed, thicker broth, more noodles. Nom nom nom. 

Today was a very traditional touristy day, which is unusual for us. Three tours and lots of walking. We are hoping we can fall asleep after sleeping for so long last night.