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| 7:43am |
Despite the late hour of going to
sleep, I was up at what I'd considered an early go. After a quick
splash about in the bath and a quick stand under the feather dryer
(probably also works for hair), I found it had two settings: Low,
and Progressively High. Yup, it would start out higher than Low, and
the tone and pitch of the dryer increased the longer it stayed on.
(I was tempted to leave it on for several minutes to see if it would
eventually only be audible to dogs, but I was told to stop by the
groggy-eyed Tubby.) |
| 8:26am |
A review of the maps, travel books, and tour suggestions was lovely,
but my tummy was still quite vacant. Thus, food was the first order
of business, and we were off after firming up our shuttle appointment
tomorrow when we skip out to Darwin. (Why only one day in Perth? Call
it an "itinerary malfunction"... Janet Jackson like would
call it that, anyway.) |
| 8:49am |
After popping into several shops around
Perth, Tubby and I found
breakfast in the form of another Subway sandwich. The charming girl
behind the counter opened up the transaction with, "See anything
you like?" Which, of course, put the boy into vapor-lock, given
the two courses of response to that question, and only one involved
sandwiches. |
| 8:55am |
The vapor-lock broken, we emerged and saw the local
fire brigade either (a) showing off their new engines, or (b)
gathering for a bagel convention. Either way, it was lovely. |
| 9:18am |
One of the churches about town, this
one appeared to be Catholic. |
| 9:21am |
We arrived at the Perth Mint, opened c. 1899. Unlike the mint in
Canberra, this isn't a national mint, but had opened to do minting
for the territory of Western Australia. Today, the mint produces commemorative
and collectible coins, whereas Canberra makes the clanky bits of change
you'd feed into a parking meter. Of the one pictures we could take
outdoors, we got this one, a replica of a
miner's camp. |
| 10:00am |
The tour offered a display of turning
gold into a gold bar. Taken from an oven heated to 1300°C, the
gold (with a melting point of something like 1063°C) is taken
from the furnace and poured into a mold. Once done, the brick is freed
from the mold after only a few seconds, and placed into a holder that's
lowered into tap water, which cools it to room temperature. This all
happens in under two minutes. (Then, they melt the brick down again
for the next display at 11am.) |
| 10:50am |
We finally wandered out of the Perth Mint and over to the Fire
Brigade Museum, but not before I got myself a solid silver medallion
with an engraving on the back. (It's 99.9% pure silver, 15.55g in
weight, or 1/2 ounce of silver... they had a pure gold one, but it
was something of AU$640, which was bit more than I wanted to put on
my bill.) |
| 11:25am |
The museum part of the museum didn't
have as much as the fire safety and prevention areas (but then again,
it's the fire and safety folks paying for the free museum), so we
were on our way. |
| 11:58am |
Another god-lovin' church.
The Unitarian Church of Australia, it seems to be. |
| 12:10pm |
Remember back when
this was in the States? Sure, it's been a while... a LONG while... |
| 12:22pm |
I wonder if there's really enough call for a pure
vegetarian fast-food family restaurant? At least for the moment,
I guess the answer is yes. (Unless they somehow share the profits
of their neighboring "cuffs" enterprise...) But speaking
of pure, we had to stop for lunch. Well... mostly; I just had a Sprite. |
| 2:02pm |
Mr. Mallow on the left was shipped
using proper package cushioning, whereas Mr. Mallow on the right was
just lumped into the packing crate. Which Mr. Mallow would you rather
be? |
| 2:19pm |
A regrouping occurs in the room. The most recent stop, Target (they
don't wear red and khaki, by the by), left Tubby with two containers
of confectionary, and the conundrum of which check-out line to use,
given the clerks were all rather pretty. He elected to run in the
middle queue, Alicia, who was rather dull-witted, but efficient. The
lass on lane 15 was clearly bored, but maybe she's just never met
me. |
| 3:35pm |
Overtaken by boredom, and a lack of
motivation to do extensive amounts more of walking (or having myself
carried), I opted to take in the new Paul Hogan and Michael Caton
film -- Strange Bedfellows
(spoiled ending herein) -- which didn't have anything to do with Crocodile
Dundee... and from the looks of it, I'm not sure that we will soon
see it in the States. |
| 5:58pm |
Back in the room, I dial in to check my mail, and discover the oddest
bit... in the course of waiting my mail to open, my connection at
28.8Kbps is sending about 1MB of data a minute. That's perhaps not
fast, but I'm not sending anything. Odd. Reboot time. |
| 6:32pm |
We depart for dinner down the street
at Fast Eddy's, purported to be the best burgers in Perth. |
| 7:24pm |
Back at the hotel. So, what we learned is that "burger"
is generically used, or at least, is at Fast Eddy's. Thus, when we
ordered a bacon burger with cheese, we got a bun, cheese, and bacon.
Just bacon. If we'd wanted the burger with a beef patty, then we'd
have wanted to order the "burger burger" and added bacon
and cheese. Complicated. |
| 8:09pm |
We're out the door to a second movie,
Thunder-something. In waiting for the food to be ready at Fast Eddy's,
there was a local activities paper there, including the movie write-ups.
This film is also an Australian film (go figure, eh?), something of
a road trip or something. |
| 8:17pm |
Despite the first film of the day only being AU$5.50 (about US$4),
the assumption that a second would be reasonable proved to be a bit
misguided... $14.50, a steep jump from $5.50, I thought. Sure, it
wasn't going to break my budget. (Particularly as film-going is under
a different budget category, or so my staff
accountant tells me.) |
| 8:19pm |
We opt instead to pop into a City
Convenience Store and pick up some Diet Pepsi, at $2.20 for 600ml
(about 20 ounces, US$1.60 or so). I could buy a lot of soda for $14.50,
y'know. |
| 8:34pm |
Back at the hotel. I suppose, in retrospect, the non-movie isn't
such a bad thing, given we have to be up at 5am tomorrow to begin
the jaunt out to Darwin. |
| 8:57pm |
With most things packed up and ready
to roll, I'm fixing to post and bounce off to sleep. |
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