One more thing about food

Sorry to go on about food but this one ties into history. Well, sort of.
I have noticed on my travels about the city of Perth that there are two phrases that I see repeated over and over again and both of them speak to a certain cultural sadness here in Australia. They are the often-seen words “convict labor” and the sadder still “food court”.

Most Australians get pissed off when outsiders remind them of their former colony’s penal outpost status. But I have to say, there are a lot of places that have little plaques on them that tell all about the convict labor that was used to build them. I say to you Australians, be not ashamed of this past. The buildings the convicts built seem to be a lot nicer than the newer stuff that the multinational construction conglomerates have put up so I say take pride. And the construction people might want to think about returning to the convict pool for a source of labor. They seem to have done a mighty fine job, way back when.

And I don’t know what it is about food courts, but this country is crazy for them. Not that the US is not and I would be willing to bet that we exported this scourge over here. But it would seem that every little shopping arcade and big building in downtown Perth is blessed with a food court. It makes it easy to locate the Subway sandwiches, I must admit.

It is our last show tonight and then we scatter for parts apart. We have one week of break before we reconvene in Wellington, New Zealand. A whole new town and a whole new country and whole new money but it still has the same Queen on it. She gets around, Liz.

Our time here in Perth has been swell and we are sad to leave the warm beaches and beauty of the temperate Indian Ocean. Everyone at the Festival has been great to us and they really run a fine operation here.

I leave for Sydney to see friends, along with Tanya who has a busy schedule of family weddings and events and even a debutante ball to attend! Others are going straight on to Wellington or elsewhere in NZ. A large group is heading south here in Western Australia to the Margaret River, which is supposedly gorgeous and there are lots of good things to eat there.

I must admit I still want to see a koala bear and I am a purist so I want to see it in the wild and not at a zoo. Are there koalas in Sydney? Are they urban-type marsupials, like our own North American possums, who can be found ransacking the trash cans of major cities? It is a stupid thing to want, a tourist thing I know, but what can I say? Though I snobbily would prefer to think of myself as a traveler, indeed I am also at times just another American tourist, looking for the food court to eat her Subway combo.