The surprisingly pleasant weekend

I must admit that I had pretty much written off this weekend. It's honours thesis deadline for one of my students and I thought I'd be stuck at home all weekend correcting drafts before the due date on Monday. Fortunately, the student sent me a draft on Friday night which I proceeded to edit that evening (and again on Saturday morning) and that was that. Finished! The rest of the weekend pretty much still ahead of me.

I decided to reward myself with a visit to a gallery in Richmond to see an exhibition of aboriginal art. I had gone to the same gallery a couple of weeks ago with Nathan where we shown the works sitting at the back. The spunky chick who worked at the gallery showed us two paintings that had already been reserved for the National Gallery of Victoria. One was a huge collaborative work comprising multicoloured circles. Another was a smaller, more abstract piece with paint smeared over the canvas in blocks of rich plum and straw yellow. Most of the rest of the paintings were rather average. Some looked like crap.

Anyhoo...on my return visit, the exhibition was up. The spunky chick had hung all the paintings and did an amazing job grouping the pieces together that even the crap ones looked absolutely superb. She tells me that the NGV had decided not to take the smaller canvas because they already had some good works by that artist in the collection. After much deliberation, I decided to buy the painting for myself.

Evening was spent with friends of Nathan's at a vietnamese restaurant that wasn't Minh Minh's. This was most unexpected as it seems that Minh Minh's had been THE venue of choice everytime we go out with these people. The food at the new place was good but very westernised.The dinner was a birthday celebration for the ex of one of Nathan's friend, Ad. The ex is a lovely man...italian, beautiful and a really decent guy (and I suspect most of us actually like him more than Ad). Still, all the people at the dinner were friends of Ad. This I found a little odd. Either the ex has no other friends of his own or the birthday was really just an excuse for Ad to get together with his friends. Regardless, with the exception of Nathan's singing (they had a karaoke), I had a really great time. And no, I didn't kiss the birthday boy.