Girl's weekend in Canberra

I have just spent the weekend in Canberra with my good friends Lisa and Julia.  The main reason for the trip was to see the Degas exhibition at the National Gallery but Lisa and Julia also felt it was their duty to introduce me to the national capital given that I am now an Australia citizen.  There was a stunned silence in the car when I enquired "what is that four legged structure with the flag at the top"?  Apparently it's Parliament House the home of Australian politics.  Every time I tried to take a picture Julia and Lisa insisted on having their backs to the camera which is a feature of most of Degas' paintings - I was particularly taken with the Carillon (the white tower in the photo) which is basically a bell tower with 55 bells which was a present from the British and is regularly played by local and international carillonists.  The sound of it travels across the city and is incredibly atmospheric.  Canberra is a very interesting city in that it has been built to be a capital rather than becoming a capital.  Every second step you fall upon a monument and all these monuments are within a short walk of each other - it's almost too set-up for my taste but you can tell it's a city supposed to be a capital.  

The Degas exhibition was excellent - we were lucky enough to have a guide between 5 of us and she really helped put the works into context.  The National Gallery is amazing with a fantastic Sculpture Garden and there were a number of permanent exhibitions that I would have loved to look around but we ran out of time.  

The rest of the weekend was spent eating and drinking - a speciality of ours.  We even had dinner in the same restaurant as Stirling Mortlock (the Wallabies captain) which Lisa was very excited about.  

Whilst we were away Jules and Craig had the "commune" running smoothly with a trip to the zoo and a dinner where the boys made dinosaurs out of the food which had all the children gobbling up everything on their plates!