Thoughts about Floriade

Devastatingly Gorgeous Man (from now on he'll just be known as DGM) had to work today (like he does every Saturday). I wanted to do something fun with the monkey but didn't want to spend much money. It was a nice day so we (I) decided to go to Floriade. Here are some of my thoughts about it.

On parking...
Thinking about parking is what puts me off going to Floriade, Skyfire etc, any big "gathering" of people that will involve driving around for ages looking for a park, then having to get out of the carpark afterwards when there's lots of traffic. I get irrationally stressed by parking in general and usually only go to these big events if someone else drives. But today I bit the bullet (where does that expression come from???) and went. We got lucky after about 10 minutes of driving around looking and got a GREAT park. About as close to the crossing over Commonwealth Avenue as possible. Score. And it was an easy one to drive into as well, didn't have to muck around at all. YES!!! Great success.

Thing is when we finally got back to the car, some stupid dumb-ass had decided to park in part of the road that absolutely wasn't (and it was very obvious that it wasn't) a park. Right behind my car. Stress levels shot up. Got the monkey in the car and started stressing about how I was going to get out. Luckily a nice man stopped and guided me through it and I got out ok but I think it took a good 10 minutes for my blood pressure to come anywhere near back to normal. Contemplated leaving a note in the stupid dumb-ass's car (the window was open a couple of inches) but chickened out. (Slightly off-topic, DGM found 2 such notes on the windscreen of his car today because he parked so badly lol).

On flowers and the design of the garden beds...
Flowers are cool. Really, you wouldn't go to Floriade if you didn't find flowers to be somewhat interesting. After a while though, you wonder just how many more bloody tulips you need to see to consider the excursion to be worth-while. Or maybe that's just me. But anyway what gets me is the garden bed designs. There are these little signs telling you what the garden bed is designed to look like. For example "The raised garden bed represents the rounded wine bottle". Or "This garden is inspired by a red hot chili pepper (Looked nothing like Anthony Kiedis to me and believe me if there was ANY resemblance I would have seen it). WTF?? The only way you'd even know this is if you looked at it from space. Or possibly on the big ferris wheel but I wasn't going to shell out $14 for the monkey and me to go on it, so I can't tell you how it would have looked from there. Probably just like flowers.

On how everyone becomes a professional photographer at Floriade...
There's something about all the flowers that brings DSLRs out of cupboards all across Canberra (actually the whole world, probably, given all the nationalities represented there today). Everyone seems convinced that they are going to get THE BEST SHOT EVER of a tulip. Best. Shot. Ever.

Seen one tulip photo, seen 'em all, really. It's a tulip. If you want to know what a tulip looks like, google it and you'll find several BILLION photos of tulips. I want to go and ask these people what exactly they think they will manage to capture in their photo of a tulip that's never been done before, but that would be mean so I don't.

And then of course there's the "standing/crouching down in front of the flowers, looking really uncomfortable but hey, I need photographic evidence that I did actually attend Floriade" photos. Admittedly I tried taking a couple of these. This was the best one I could get.



(I'm so awesome at this blogging thing. It turned my photo around and I can't fix it. you'll just have to tilt your head or the monitor.)

On other people's kids...
My monkey is inquisitive and has spirit. My monkey loves to learn through doing and is confident enough to explore his environment without needing me to hold his hand all the time. Translation: my monkey loves to run away at any given opportunity. Yes, I took the pram. Yes he stayed in the pram for most of the time. I decided to let him out for a walk. He told me he was going to hold me hand. He lied.

He saw swans and ran towards the lake. I bolted after him, pushing the empty pram, and grabbed him just in time (given his history with water I didn't trust him to stop at the edge). Now as we then sat there watching the swans, several other kids came up. Some older, some younger. None of them looked like they were about to run straight into the water. They were all walking sensibly along, keeping a respectable distance from the edge of the wall. Is my kid the only one who doesn't do that?? I felt a bit better when one of the other kids got bitten by one of the swans though hehehehe :-)

On wearing sunscreen to Floriade...
You should. I didn't. :-(