Hahndorf

Hahndorf, the oldest surviving german settlement. This is a fact that you are incapable of missing if you didn't go through Hahndorf while yelling at the top of your voice with your eyes shut, and rat stuck in your ear. You would think that this would seem promising for me, and I even managed to get a Pretzel there, which was good by Australian standards and disastrous by German standards. The only other relations to Germany came from three pubs where all the girls had to wear Dirndl's, and an obsession of having pendulum clocks in tourist shops costing more than my car after applying the times 10 multiplier.

[Translation: Welcome to Hahndorf. Our village should become nicer]

After my local friend spent some time getting scared about every corner on the scenic road to Hahndorf, the complaints abruptly stopped when she fell asleep. I'm assuming that she fell asleep instead of going unconscious out of shock as she also curled up on the sofa after getting back. But with this turn of events, I was free to attack Adelaide again.

This basically translated into sitting in Victoria Square for many hours, and then enjoying the light around the river at sundown, but I'm happy. :-) And I still wish I would have brought a better camera.

A lot of things in Adelaide seem to feel the need to be far more pronounced. It's very hard to get away with "I didn't know" considering that the same thing is usually said on multiple signs, directly on top of each other. Parking area signs usually end with "at all time" in large unfriendly capital letters. And the police also seems to constantly show its presence. The last two night that I've taken the train home, I've ridden with an officer in the carriage, and you frequently hear announcements about all public transportation areas being recorded. I guess this is all supposed to make you feel more safe but with me it has rather the opposite effect for two reasons: why is that all necessary, and will I survive being outside of the clear boundaries where you said I'll be protected; like from the train platform to my accommodation.

Emergency vehicles also don't seem to make much of an impression on the traffic. You see lots of them around city centre, but they don't seem to move much faster than walking pace, partly due to the fact that their siren has no effect on the traffic. Was watching a convoy of four fire trucks getting over an intersection, and it was only by the second truck that the intersection finally got the message that they should, maybe, stop. The remaining two fire trucks knew their fellow citizens well though and were still extremely cautious about entering the intersection.

It's nice to sit in central Adelaide though due to how much you can see just from the one spot. Two university buildings, three church spikes, a nice lawn to face plant, trams, and just being able to watch life go by. There are also another two university building within a couple of kilometres, and basically enough stuff to classify central Adelaide as at least a small city. What would make Adelaide lose less points though is if the clock tower you can hear in the very centre of central Adelaide, wouldn't be running more than two minutes late.

While I'm highly opinionated on many other things Adelaidey, the bed calls me to sleep away the hours before I find the beach tomorrow.