Thinking Allowed: Canberra Revealed

Canberra didn't get rave reviews from others. Australians love to hate Canberra. It's not Sydney. It's not Melbourne. And worst of all it has no beach. One of the top reasons to live in Canberra is always that it is three and a half hours drive to Sydney. How does that make it on the lists? Bill Bryson picked up on this theme and really magnified it. In his writing anything is better than living in Canberra. Only one person was positive enough to say "It's boring but you will like it." So it makes sense that we were nervous about our move.

Canberra was a compromise city. Sydney and Melbourne are both shining stars and no one could decide which should be the capital. Things got so heated between the two cities that it was finally decided that neither would be the capital. Sounds like our kind of decision making! So they choose an empty location between the two rivals and called it the capital. Since there was nothing in the spot before some city planners really got to have a ball trying things out. So here we are in a park of a city. A string of suburbs attached by green corridors. Really I was skeptical of the setup: man made lakes, wide roads, pervasive suburbia, division of stores and housing, and oh the rumors.

Yet so far I like it. Maybe it is that we are boring or bourgeois at heart. But I thinks it is really that you can't go wrong surrounded by mountains. We live in the center of town and have to walk through a long forest to get to a playground. Our view from the balcony is a mountain. We can leave our door and follow greenways right to our trail run. It takes 10 minutes to leave the city and be in the bush. So things are looking rosy out here in Canberra.