Nostalgic Saturday

It was an unexpectedly nostalgic day for me today.

After lunch, we went to Floriade for a walk. This annual spring flower festival has been going on for many years. I hadn't been for quite some time though (probably not since I was a teenager). It was nice to walk around the garden beds at Commonwealth Park. It brought back a lot of childhood memories of family barbeques and riding my BMX bike with my cousins.

In the afternoon, I visited the National Gallery of Australia specifically to see one painting. I first saw it more than 10 years ago and, since then, the painting has been in storage. Only recently has it been brought back out for display. It is by one of my favourite aboriginal artists, Peter Skipper, and his wife, Mona Chuguna. It is a collaborative work called Husband and wife that tells their love story and how the couple first met. You can see a single pair of black foot prints moving north from the middle of the picture. That's suppose to be Peter's. Then, at some point (to the right of the yellow trees), he meets Mona and the couple, now depicted as intertwining footprints, meander upwards and off the top of the canvas.  How romantic.

To cap off my nostalgic day, we went for dinner at my favourite Vietnamese restaurant. The restaurant closed suddenly about a decade ago but recently reopened in another part of the city centre and they still had my favourite dish...stewed beef with rice noodles in five spice flavoured broth. Yum!