National Postal Museum

Another still, misty, grey day today, not actually raining while I was out. The nieghbourhood is starting to take on a glow in some places where a particular type of tree (of course, I don't recognise any of the trees) is beginning to turn yellow ahead of the rest. The majority of the background still looks almost overwhelmingly lush and green, but here and there are patches of other colours. There's one place on the walk between here and the Metro station where, if I look east, nearly all of what I see is green, while if I look west from the same spot, I see almost all yellow.

I was at the National Postal Museum today. The restored lobby is just magnificent. I can't describe it without using cliches. Words like imposing, grand, lofty, ornate, come to mind. Inside the museum proper, it was much quieter than the History Museum, and also smaller, so I spent more time looking at the various sections in detail. In some ways the development of the postal system parallels ours in Australia because we were taking on the various new technologies at around the same time, but the major difference is that communications had a much harder time spreading across Australia because it could not be densely settled in the same way the US could. A lot of our cross continental traffic of all kinds was either by sea (and obviously therefore not directly across the continent) or later, by rail.

It was interesting to see the rural mail box art, because people also put up decorative mail boxes in country areas in Australia. I remember my father making a mail box in the shape of a covered wagon. In the case of my family, the only mail delivered to that mail box was carried by the school bus, but in other parts of the country there are still rural mail deliveries by the postal service to people's boxes at the side of the road.

From the postal museum I went across the road to Union Station, which is even huger, more ornate and more imposing than the museum. (The museum was actually built in a style designed to be complementary to Union Station). I couldn't get over all the restaurants, cafes and other eating places in there, not to mention the many boutique-y shops. If you keep walking long enough, you eventually manage to penetrate through to the station.

I've been fnding the Metro very disorienting because it's underground. Our much smaller, simpler electric train system in Perth runs above ground, so I'm used to having external cues to tell me where I am (and I know my way around pretty well anyway). Luckily the Metro is very well signposted, and so far I've always managed to be on the right platform to catch the train I want. However I often feel as if the train is taking off in completely the opposite direction to where I want to go.