On Friday night I got a flight to Hobart, Tasmania, for a weekend away. I flew JetStar, the plane was an A320 (we like Airbus). Inside it was comfortable and shiny.
I stayed at the Hotel Grand Chancellor, a midrange hotel on the water, not far from the touristy Salamanca area. I liked my room, it was on the corner so I had windows on two sides, one facing towards the sea and the other looking across the Derwent River via the bridge. Looked really good at night. I had a king-size bed, as requested and it was luxury to sleep without either curling into a fetal position or hanging my feet over the edge. There is something that always pisses me off about hotels, and it is this: they never have an extractor fan in the bathroom. In this bathroom, they did. Ten points just for that.
I had paella for dinner. I guess Tasmanian scallops aren’t so expensive in Tasmania because my meal was full of them. I love scallops.
After dinner it was time to go to the pub, and I found myself in a room full of ferals watching a peculiar performer wearing a leopard-print fez perched atop a mexican wrester’s mask. An unusual show. Being Tasmania, they of course had Cascade on tap. So, naturally, Cascade was what I drank. Oh, and also vodka. Once I had finished with drinking it was off to the next stop, a bar not far from my hotel. Only one drink in they turned on the fuckoff lights so back to the hotel it was.
On Saturday I had a cup of coffee for lunch at a café/laundromat called Machine. I wasn’t feeling the best after that so I went back to my hotel room and slept until almost dark. It was time to go out!
I started at Isobar, only because I had heard of it and knew where it was. There was a hen’s night on and I was targetted to help the hen complete her checklist. She now has my number and the dollar she earned by selling me a kiss. My next stop was an “Irish” pub. It was a sausagefest and my beer was served in a plastic glass. I didn’t even bother to finish my drink. I finished up at some other nearby sandstone pub, where some guy told me that it had been snowing on Mt Wellington (the mountain over Hobart) that day. For my Northern readers, in Australia it will be Summer in eight days. Right now in Sydney it is 39°C.
Sunday I got up for a noontime breakfast of eggs benedict, once again at Machine. This was the first thing I had eaten since the paella, as I had forgotten to eat on Saturday. Afterwards I went to the Parliament Lawns (? or something) for a live music festival thing. They had wine for sale, packaged in small thin cans like Red Bull. The music wasn’t thrilling me, although I did get up for a bit of a dance to a reggae band.
Something I noticed in Hobart, possibly related to the freezing temperatures: there were a lot of people coughing everywhere. The pubs are all non-smoking, so that was not it. [update: it is because of germs, I now have a Hobart cold]
All too soon it was time to go home. When I arrived in Sydney I was hit by a wave of hot and humid air. It was like the experience of getting off a plane in a tropical country, what I felt in PNG or Malaysia. In two days I had acclimatised tot he cold of Tassie and my own city seemed tropical. I got over that pretty quickly.
I shouldn’t have gone.