Ky and I are in Tasmania this week for a friend’s wedding, and our journey starts in Hobart.
We flew in to Hobart this morning after spending some time in my favourite part of the world (the airport lounge, which was surprisingly good!). Hobart is a great place, and we started our journey with a trip to enjoy the local delicacy, the curried scallop pie. Smith’s Pies, located in an industrial estate next to a couple of prefabricating workshops, has a 4.8 rating on Google Maps, which is very well deserved. Pies, whether scallop filled or otherwise, are difficult to come across in the States, so I always make sure I have my fill while over here.
For the afternoon, we went to arguably one of Australia’s most famous art galleries, the Museum of New and Old Art, better known as Mona. This ain’t your usual gallery; first off, it’s private, and founded by a mad man called David Walsh, who made a fortune developing algorithms to bet on horse racing. He took his winnings and have invested them into a particularly strange gallery.
No trip would be complete without visiting the Poo Machine, formally known as Cloaca. The artist who created it described how most modern art was “genuinely just crap passed off as art”, he decided to take out the middle man and create an elaborate, $5 million dollar series of machines that “digested” food waste and then excreted them at 2pm each day. The irony was astounding.
Other memorable pieces was The Confessional, where guests could talk into a black void, and it was connected accoustically to the outside of the buildiing. You could chat to passerbys upstairs, and they could hear you and answer back, but you would never know who they were. The goal was for people to announce great fears or secrets; Ky and I just pretended we were talking dogs, much to the amusement of the kids above.
Overall, it was a great start to our Tassie trip. I won’t be rushing back to Mona – we saw our fair share – but I think I’ll be back one day. They’re building a new wing, so it may be sooner than later.
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