I started the day with a client Microsoft Teams meeting with NZTA at 8.30. Despite best efforts it was a bit of a drama getting connected but I was relieved to find that the NZTA team took another 5 minutes to connect to the engineers in one of their meeting rooms. All and all a successful meeting and an efficient way to get a big group connected.

I’ve checked with auntie google and it’s Adelaide Cup Day which apparently warrants a public holiday. And they’ve got a great day for it.

After the meeting it was breakfast time (fortunately breakfast goes until 10am). Very nice Spanish eggs for me and poached eggs with salmon for Mike. They do hot coffee so that’s also a plus. On the downside the restaurant isn’t fully open again for dinner so this time we’ve found an Italian restaurant that is open and we booked early.

We Ubered into the centre again and spent most of the day in the South Australia Art Gallery. It’s very much worth a visit. We each had to find the work we’d most want to take home and that was a good exercise to look at the various collections with a goal. It’s a big place with a lot of mixed galleries and disconnected works which was a challenge. We stopped after a couple of hours and had a glass of water and then it was back to it.

The artwork I most wanted to take home was an aboriginal piece that symbolises the night sky. It is embedded with thousands of tiny beads like stars. Mike’s favourite was a painting of this Greek soothsayer princess person who was sitting on a high stool and was hauntingly beautiful. I must get in the groove of photographing more.

After showing each other our must have pieces (we were united on the ‘must never see again’ piece (a sculpture of two deformed and fused horse carcasses) we ubered back to Hotel Alba and chilled beside the pool which was lovely. The water is clean and warm. Very resort like.

Eventually we were seduced with the kiwi gimlets.

We had dinner at Osteria Oggi which is a very nice Italian restaurant. I stuck with the fish theme and it was delicious. We ate out on the footpath under umbrellas and it was lovely. We were out of the sun and the temperature gradually dropped.

We chose to walk home which was a nice 20 minute stroll. We’ve noticed that they take particular care of fire-related infrastructure here. The hydrants are often inside the buildings behind glass windows and are often highly polished or painted. (Need to photo some). We found the following beside the fire station.

We also saw these things all along the street. We have no idea what they are. They apparently lift off and don’t seem that heavy (although obviously we couldn’t lift them off cos they are locked on somehow). They seemed to be every 50m or 100m alongside this park place.