Here we are day 3 in Darwin. Day one we spent bits of the afternoon after arriving getting caught up on sleep and viewing the city from the roof of our building. Darwin CBD is small we walk it all in fifteen minutes. There is a mall and a shopping centre with a Coles supermarket ten-minutes away and a Woolworths supermarket eleven-minutes away. Fifteen-minute walk is the Darwin Waterfront Precinct a cool area with lots of restaurants and shops and Stokes Hill Wharf where cruise ships would come in if it were not for Covid-19. I have lived in Hawaii (1969 – 1971 / 1980 – 1981) as well as a few visits. I took my parents to Pearl Harbor and thought I knew lots of stuff. But until yesterday I did not know that more aircraft attacked Darwin than attacked Pearl Harbor. More bombs fell on Darwin than on Peral Harbor. More ships were sunk in Darwin. On 19 February 1942 Darwin was bombed. We watched folks setting up a huge tent for the memorial in ten-days 19th February. A lot going on here in the next couple of weeks.
This is not what I was really going to write about – got side-tracked.
Yesterday we decided to do one of our favourite tourist things – take a random bus ride. We do this wherever we are - enjoying getting lost, exploring wherever we decide to get off the bus or train when stuff looks interesting. This time last year we were in Rotterdam taking train rides. Yesterday we took the #04 bus to Casuarina Interchange, which has the largest shopping centre in the Northern Territory. A fun fact: buses are free anytime any place for us elderly folks with a senior’s card. Usually 3 – 7 bucks. We are so white. Living in Adelaide we see few Aboriginals though a lot of folks from Asia. Darwin, we seem to be the minority. On the bus we were the only white people. At the Casuarina Square Shopping Centre we were in the minority. They even speak a different language, giving the feel that we are in a foreign place. Of course, the reality is that we are the foreigners. Actually, we are with me being born in the USA and Narda in the Netherlands. It is difficult to gauge what they think of us as people seldom will make eye contact and we do say hello or good morning etc with a rather forced response. Darwin is quite expensive compared to Adelaide. We find most restaurants 25% more expensive though we make our meals at home usually, due to my fussy diets of lows-carb vegetarian organic crap. But the locals seem very poor. I think due to the mining industry around the place that there is a lot of money for those who work in the mines but perhaps it is not spread around to the locals. I came to Australia in 1981 and Narda in 1958 except for about 13-years living in New York and China we have been here for quite some time. Neither of us knows much about local culture. We just live in our white world. 2021 is our year to learn about the amazing culture here. So far in Darwin we are just in our little bubble, staying in a western hotel, eating once in awhile in a western pub but we are going to integrate or at least learn why we are referred to as the privileged ones.