East/West

Five things that Perth gets, that Canberra does not:

Beer Gardens. Real beer gardens with open spaces, comfy seats, greenery, and music. Creatures also fits into this category.
Public Transport. I use Google Transit to find the best route from place to place, say Mt Lawley to Freo. I pay with the card in my wallet, the one linked to my bank account, and that lets me get on and off as many buses, trains or even ferries as I need and calculates the cheapest possible fare you’d pay for the connection, then deducts 25%. I don’t have to think about when the next bus is, or whether I can make a connection, or if I have enough coins for a fare. I just ride. Once I’m in the city I can take any of the free, frequent CAT services to zip around. A lot of the time it’s as quick as driving, particularly for longer distances with a train connection.
Sunsets. A thousand words.
Coffee. It’s pretty hard to get a bad cup of coffee in Mt Lawley, Subiaco or Fremantle, or countless other suburbs with a big coffee culture presence. Even the city has a burgeoning collection of edgy coffee joints and to put it simply, places that don’t do coffee well go out of business very quickly. Oh, and drive through espresso, genius.
Drinking on Sunday. The Sunday session is an institution. Whether it’s in one of the aforementioned beer gardens, looking over the beach, or just at the local pub, Sunday afternoon is time to head down to the pub. It helps that all the bottle shops are closed. A pint and a pizza for $10, you can’t beat that.

Five things that Canberra gets, that Perth does not:

Cocktail Bars. With bartenders that understand cocktails. With cocktails that taste like cocktails. With music that suits cocktails. Canberra has three superb cocktail bars and host of others that can knock together a decent drink. All open late, all are reasonably priced, all can make you a negroni worth waiting for.
Supermarkets. If I want to go grocery shopping at 10pm on a Tuesday evening, I can. When I lived in the city, and didn’t have my car here, I did this a lot. In fact, I think 80% of my food shopping would be done in hours where the shops are closed in Perth.
Autumn. A thousand words.
Tea: I have never seen such a bewildering variety of the green and black stuff until I moved here. Stores stock aisles of near identical boxes of white elderflower and mink dusk infused chai-masala herbal full leaf tea. The Canberra Centre even has two speciality retailers that just sell tea. That’s it, floor to ceiling, tea.
Drinking on Thursday. Two big universities in town, both of which have Friday off, mean Thursday night is an insane student free-for-all. If you want two-dollar drinks, atrocious music, and stumbling home at four in the morning, Canberra has you covered.

Shoutouts

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