Canberra is a 3.5 hour drive from Sydney, yet it is not a popular destination for study abroad students. Why? I have no idea- who doesn't want to see Parliament and many museums??? Haha! But it ended up being an amazing trip and I am glad that I had the opportunity to see this town filled with parks and beautiful white buildings.
I learned about the government and found out that many Australians do not pay attention to politics. BUT, they are all REQUIRED to vote. Voting is compulsory. This is so different from the U.S. because Australians are actually fined if they don't vote (I saw on the Sydney Morning Herald website that voting is this weekend!)
This is my opinion, but I don't like the fact that voting is manditory. Many people don't know anything about who is running for the elections but still have to vote. I guess when this happens, they just pick a name that sounds good! Anyway, it is just a different system than the U.S. and there are benefits and drawbacks to both systems.
In Canberra, everything is called "National" something like the National Gallery of Australia, the National Capitol Exhibition, National Museum of Australia, Australian National Botanic Gardens, and Australian National University. I liked this because it is pretty cool to say that I have been to the National Gallery of Australia- it sounds way better than "The Art Gallery" or something like that!
Since Canberra is spread out, we walked to the different attractions and pheeew- it was a lot of walking! I will talk about the bus rides to and from Canberra in the next blog (it needs a blog of itself to tell the story!)
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