Visitors.

So what do you do in Hobart when you have visitors from the mainland? Over the last week we dedicated ourselves to the cause and engaged in some serious tourist behaviour......Hobart style.

We journeyed up to the top of Mt Wellington and looked down on Hobart.....which really does appear small and insignificant from such an elevated vantage point:

We ate cake at Sweet Envy......after seeing the stunning 'Life of Pi' in 3D at the fabulously converted State Cinema in North Hobart:

And we went to dinner at Piccolo, which used to be our favourite restaurant around town until we succumbed to the hype of Garragistes....we were wondering why we had left it literally years between meals.....especially as it accepts bookings and look how delicious the food is:

And OF COURSE, as 400,000 people did last year, we went and worshipped at the temple of David Walsh....submerging ourselves for the day at the 'subversive Disneyland for adults' which is (MONA):

Our visitors were lucky enough to score a double dose of the bizarreness which drives the whole David Walsh/MONA bandwagon, as last week was also the MONA festival of music and art, MONA FOMA, to which we all acquired festival passes:

Colloquially, it's referred to as MoFo.....which is a little bit rude, although maybe not as bad as the full word that it's short for. Even our premier referred to it by this moniker out loud on opening night.....the curator Bryan Ritchie from the 'Violent Femmes', who now resides in Hobart, couldn't help himself and had to make mention of much he loves to hear her say it.

We went to four of the five nights of music.....and might just have made it to five if we hadn't snuck in one rather early morning at the disturbingly decrepit and decadent festival nightclub, Faux Mo:

Regardless, we still experienced all manner of acts including a Spanish band kitted out in cowboy hats who played surf music, an Ethiopian Jazz singer, the French Orchestre Nationale de Jazz which played music for Robert Wyatt (who wasn't even there), an insanely boring organ recital in the Town Hall and on Sunday night, the piece de la resistance.....David Byrne and St Vincent.

When they came back for their first encore, Annie Clark recounted how she'd first heard David Byrne's music as a five year old watching the movie 'Revenge of the Nerds' and that she never would have imagined in her wildest dreams that she'd be playing a gig on stage with him.......in Tasmania. And she was.

Rx

PS While waiting for a concert out the front of the shed amongst the debris from the end of the world......which was how they'd decorated for MoFo.....I was chatting to a dad from school who, back in the mists of time had worked on 'Countdown'. I was recounting the anecdote of introducing our children to 'The Cockroaches' who turned into 'The Wiggles' and guess what....it's true.....Molly may have had a special relationship with the purple Wiggle. And there I was believing that it was just an urban myth for housewives.