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We spent about 5 days in Adelaide, 3 before Kangaroo Island and a couple after. Adelaide is the place that all Australians (other than the city's residents themselves) slate, saying it's boring, unattractive and not worth visiting. Having heard variations on this description from many people, we were surprised to find that we really like the place. The Autumn weather has been perfext most of the time too, which helps, but it's just a really nice, small city.
We've spent quite a bit of time at the beach suburb, Glenelg. It's a lovely place, nice shopping street, cheap restaurants and a good beach. This is one of the great things about Australia, the big cities all have lovely beach suburbs which are easy to get to on public transport and have a much more laid back vibe than the cities themselves. In Glenelg is the Rodney Fox Shark Museum, which was small but really good. Rodney was almost bitten in half by a Great White in the sixties. I remember reading about him when I was little, so it was great to go to his museum.
Whilst we were in Adelaide the Fringe Festival was on. Second biggest in the world after Edinburgh, there are thousands of performances over three weeks. On our first night we wandered down to the 'Garden of Unearthly Delights', a park a few blocks from our hostel which had been transformed into the main performance area. There were lots of performance tents, portable bars and cafes, roving comedians trying to promote their shows and a huge trapeze show. It was packed out with people enjoying the atmosphere and the performers. We watched a Canadian woman do a not very funny show. The next night we went to see a local comedian called Rob Hunter at a nearby comedy club. This was a good show, funny guy.
On our first stint in Adelaide we stayed at a hostel called My Place. It was a nice enough place although overpriced. We were in a 5 bed dorm and whilst 2 of the other 3 beds had people coming and going every day, the third, sadly, did not. This guy was a total geek, but he didn't know it. ALL he talked about was himself, and how he's planning to stay the whole year in Adelaide (not see anywhere else at all), just because he met some nice people from Adelaide in England or something. He had been at the hostel for a month and was looking for a room in a house, and told us in great detail about all the ones he went to see each day and why he rejected them all; for the most ridiculous reasons too like the neighbourhood wasn't as nice as his posh Oxford suburb, or one of the people in the house was European (he wanted Aussies) or even just that the driveway wasn't swept! And all he did all the time was talk talk talk on and on. One very annoying geeky little git. Katie being a kind soul humoured him and kept talking to him, but i just gave up after the first couple of hours and pretty much ignored him for the next three days!
I think to sum Adelaide up I would say that it's a lovely place, but it's hard to put your finger on why. We enjoyed our time here, and I think it would be a great place to live. It doesn't have the attractions of Sydney (we took virtually no pictures there!), and maybe it doesn't have the culture of Melbourne (and it's far less pretentious for it), but it's just a really nice city.
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