MONA - the proper visit!

Finally, a chance to redeem myself! When I realised I had the chance to come back to Hobart and revisit MONA, I was determined to do this properly this time! Look at mustardy MR-II, though I ended up going on the grey MR-I, just like last trip. I've tried not to double up too much on my previous content, and I had a lot of fun properly exploring the outside too!

I didn't manage to get the shot exactly in the middle lol.

I love the trip up the river, the factories are fascinating!

This is the first winery I've noticed that doesn't allow people in it - the humanoid exclusion zone signs are hilarious!

Oh wow, this is new. This is an exhibit that wasn't there last time - it's a person who starts composing at the beginning of the day and then at the end of the day, a string quartet comes in and sight reads it. I think that's a really great way of showing an aspect of how music is created, as well as the artistic process!

This is the exhibit that leads to Faro restaurant, one of the fancy restaurants within MONA. It's a bit of a trek to get to from inside the museum and you can't use your phone or camera once you're on the pathway - for the reason that you have to watch your step; if you veer off the path there's a little drop!

Ok Faro restaurant is not only artsy, it actually makes great food! This beetroot mocktail was great!

Oyster salad, which had chopped oysters instead of whole oysters. And look at those succulents! I'd forgotten just how long it's been since I had really tasty ice plant and sea blight!

More eating the problem, this venison was soo good that I didn't actually need the cafe de Mona butter or any other condiments, but I ate it all anyway because it was all delicious!

This lemon parfait was cute, have you ever seen a cube ice cream before? Haha. All the food was so good, I should have spent more time and tried one more item on the menu too!

I think White Library was actually here last time too, but somehow I'd missed it. I'm not entirely sure how considering it's opposite Kryptos, but maybe that's exactly why I missed it haha. I love the concept of so many white pages, that's both inspiring and daunting!

And of course my favourite Kryptos. This time the exhibit had more traffic than last time, so it was fun listening to others get jumpscared by the final chamber haha. I still love the mood of this one!

And no more ladies lounge :( I missed out by a week or two, I'm so sad!

I stayed around till 4PM since I sensibly booked the last boat of the day, and was rewarded by a lovely session of string quartet performance! It was like a free concert built into my ticket, so awesome!

There was also a fun exhibit called Confession, where there's a soundproof chamber in the shape of the inner ear, and it's also super dark. At the end you get to speak out loud and the sound goes to the outside of the museum where passers by can have a dialogue! Of course anyone who is above ground and doesn't know about the exhibit would be so confused! I think that's so cool!

Whoops I forgot to post a picture (though I did take many) of a really random exhibit where two goldfish are in a shallow bowl with a knife in it. It's super fascinating to think about because from a human perspective, we freak out that it's so dangerous for the fish to be in the bowl, that being next to a knife is such a scary experience. But the fish don't know what a knife is, and it probably can't cut them, so they live on blissfully. Isn't that so interesting?

I was much happier with this visit and installed the O App as well, so I did it right and enjoyed it so much more! Hooray for art!

Fico

I visited a bunch of restaurants and wine bars during my hobart visit, including a fantastic dinner at Sonny where I had a lovely conversation with two other solo diners, but Fico was the only one I had booked in advance since it seemed interesting. It was fantastic!

The best thing about going to a restaurant and seeing an oyster fork, but no oysters on the menu? It means oysters are on the menu! Most of the oysters in restaurants these days are from Boomer Bay, whereas last time it was all from Flirty Bay, how interesting! Tassie oysters are so delicious!

Carrot gazpacho - it was so creamy but apparently doesn't have any cream in it! Was it really all made from carrots? Because that's incredible!

This funny looking plate was a super tasty fig leaf oil, balsamic vinegar and sea salt dip for some tasty bread! How is it that this tasted so good? That balsamic vinegar was fantastic!

My favourite dish of the night flavour and texture wise, tuna and heirloom tomatoes with horseradish cream and dashi. That tuna was amazing, and apparently there was a tomatillo in the tomato mix too! The horseradish cream was quite potent, not too bad though! Some nose fuzziness but not enough to disrupt my enjoyment of the dish.

Fico has European influences and a baby sister pasta bar, so it's no surprise there's pasta on the menu - tagliolini with calamari. I think my opinion that Lulu La Delizia makes the best pasta hasn't changed, but this was quite nice!

Haha ok this dish was awesome. It's listed as flathead royale, but they've made it so it looks like a creme caramel! The texture and flavour were so good, this was my other favourite dish! The texture of the flathead mousse was like that of a steamed egg tart or silken tofu - nice, soft and creamy, and the soy based sauce went so well with it!

Of course I said yes to adding 5g of truffle for $20 onto the duck agnolotti! I am so illiterate when it comes to Italian food that I was expecting duck on the outside rather than duck on the inside of a pasta!

Yes, venison time! Venison backstrap, venison mince en croute, and some beetroot and olive garnishes. Venison is a pest here so it's always great to see it on the menu. That pastry was done really well!

This funky looking dessert was mandarin sorbet, milk gelato, and sabayon. They even poured the sabayon tableside so it slowly blobbed downwards. When I tasted it, all elements together tasted better than each individual part, and it looks like I'm on the same page as the staff, because that's what the waiter said too! I love food that tastes different as a whole compared to the individual parts!

Lastly, a cute little choux! Filled with praline and grand marnier, what a great way to finish dinner!

Overall this was a very nice place, I'm so glad I booked it! The service was so professional, I hadn't fine dined in so long that it was super refreshing! Oh yeah, the drinks - I had two drinks, a cold pressed sour cherry juice which was lovely and tart, and then also a very fragrant raspberry kombucha. Oh, the decor is excellent too, including a hacksaw on one of the walls haha!

Since I probably won't be making posts about the other places I ate at, I wanted to mention here that Hobart has some great non alcoholic options, even at the wine bars! It's so great to see, it means I don't feel out of place regardless of what kind of eatery I'm at!

Hobart coffee adventures

Went to Hobart for work for a week, which was the perfect opportunity to explore the city and see how the specialty coffee scene has evolved since my last visit in 2017!

A lot of cafes don't open until 7 or 7:30AM so my choices on weekdays were quite limited, but I still I found some nice ones! Staple Coffee was one I kept returning to; their bagels and croissants are really tasty (and cheap?! A coffee and bagel/croissant was only around the $12 mark!).

Bloom coffee and bites is cute too! However I had a pretty strict morning schedule, and while they advertised being open at 7AM, I wasn't able to revisit because they opened a few minutes after 7 so I kept returning to Staple!

I revisited Villicia, and they still use Ona coffee!

Pigeon Whole Bakers now has an espresso machine and seems to have gotten more famous in the last few years! Their pastries are still as tasty as ever, and their filter coffee quality is still good! I even bought heaps of merch this time haha!

Lastly, Somewhere Coffee Bar! This one is a nice place, and has heaps of coffee on offer. This is probably the prime specialty coffee shop in Hobart now, and they're about 3 years old I think. I visited this one on the weekend so I had plenty of time to chat (and they're open till 5 on Saturdays!) - sampled some coffee from Good Life coffee roasters from Finland, as well as some Leaves Coffee from Japan. Oh, and they had Wood & Co roasted for Audrey coffee in Hobart - a cafe that is probably only really accessible by car so it wasn't on my to do list this trip.

One of the most interesting things while chatting was watching the barista make breakfast, which was a couple of slices of toast dipped in olive oil, salt and pepper. It's rare to see baristas making breakfasts for themselves so this was cool to watch!

Overall I think there's still some inconsistency with how filter coffee/batch brew tastes, as if it's still developing. I am pretty sure my palate was on point but a lot of the coffees lacked acidity/brightness. There was something else lacking (though sweetness was often prominent in the brews), such as body? I'm not too sure. But I am no coffee expert and I didn't have time to chat to confirm; but Pigeon Whole Baker's batch brew was the same as always so I wonder what it was!

It's great to see so many more coffee shops now!

Elgar's Violin Concerto + Shostakovich Symphony No. 12

I feel like in the last decade, I've done so much that I thought I'd never actually do in my life. Going to a classical concert is one of them! Once again I have Twoset to thank for that inspiration. I really want to actually have a better understanding of the violin, something I never cared about as a kid. This concert caught my attention because I feel like I would enjoy the intensity of Shostakovich. I'd never heard any of Elgar's stuff before but the sample I heard sounded interesting.

It wasn't until just before the concert that I realised I'd made an error in randomly booking a seat. I'd only been thinking about how much of the stage I'd be able to see, but hadn't put any thought to what I would see on stage. For ballets, this didn't matter as much since I generally just use my imagination, but in the case of an orchestra, I couldn't see pretty much the entire violin section! A grievous mistake that I can't make again! I have to remember to take the right side, when facing the stage. That being said, I did enjoy watching the cellos and double basses!

Just like my Swan Lake experience, there was a lot to take in, for the first orchestra I've watched. I almost didn't know where to focus and tried too hard to look at everything that was going on, while also trying to focus on the music. I definitely lack experience being an aural person, so I think the more concerts I go to (especially if I end up seeing one that I am familiar with), the more I'll be able to relax and actually enjoy it. My brain was mostly in overdrive watching each different section of the orchestra.

For Elgar's violin concerto, the third movement was my favourite, but as I've noticed from other concertos I've listened to; my favourite movement is generally only my favourite because of the contrast or complement from the other movements, so it's a bit contextual and depends on my mood. The soloist performance was so good, it was fun to finally see live how everything works together instead of just on Youtube! What was interesting was that I tried to use my ballet viewing experiences to interpret the music; I knew that it had three movements, so in my head I started to visualise how it would play out if it was danced to. Is that weird? I'm probably overthinking it again!

I appreciated the concerto more in hindsight once I saw the Shostakovich symphony, which was a complete contrast - there was a huge percussion set (gogo timpani player - my favourite percussionist so far!) which included an epic looking golden triangle with concavely curved sides, a giant gong, a gigantic drum, and a marching drum kit thing? I don't know what they are called. And the timpani! (Oh, side note - it was really fun to eavesdrop on a mother and her child identifying different instruments, it was really heartwarming to see children interested in this stuff! We have hope for the future!). More musicians were on stage too, and oh my goodness the piccolo flute was indeed super piercing at times! A single one can get SO LOUD! As I am still learning how to get cultured on classical music, I could be naive in saying that my favourite parts of the symphony were the double bass and cello mood sections (that mood! reminded me of my favourite Psycho Pass scene actually), as well as when the orchestra went full out and ALL the percussion was going off! So epic!!!!

What was even cooler is that my instructor was playing in the symphony, and she described Shostakovich like Star Wars, even though I'm not well versed in movies, I think the description is very fitting!

What I also realised is just how much of a visual person and an overthinker I am; I really have no natural affinity for music, which is a real challenge! I found it hard to get immersed in the music itself, I realised at many points in the performance that I was far more interested in how the drummer was slouched back against the wall, how the french horn players continually emptied the water from their instruments, inside chair page turning, often with great urgency, how the concertmaster's score didn't look like the rest of the first violin section, and looked more like the conductor's score, how absolutely energised and alive the conductor looked, facial expressions, when the baton switched hands, when he was barely conducting and enjoying the moment, when the conductor and the concertmaster giggled while they waited for someone's dying cough to stop before they started the next movement, what were the post-it notes on the conductor's score for, one of the bassoon players also played the contrabassoon, did the violins all have mutes on??? when did they put the mutes on??? i want to watch them take off the mutes NOOOO i missed it cause i was looking at something else, timpani player is epic, omg the principal flautist and bass clarinet player faces are so red by the end of it, so on and so forth. Riveting content!!!

I can't wait to watch more concerts!!! I think the more I go to them the more I'll enjoy them!

La Bayadere

I guess I'm a ballet enthusiast now? I really enjoyed watching Swan Lake and Echoes of Van Gogh last year and was looking into this year's lineup.

La Bayadere, it turns out, has a very high degree of technicality and it was super impressive! WA Ballet's interpretation is different from the original, and I enjoyed the plotline. I think I was holding my breath for most of it, especially during Act II, The Kingdom of the Shades, the arabesque train down a slope!!! Omg! All the ballerinas were trembling, it must have been so intense! I have so much respect for the strength of ballet dancers!

This time I also paid some attention to the orchestra too, I feel like part of the magic of ballet is also that the conductor is watching the ballet in order to make sure the orchestra is in sync. So cool!

There's nothing quite like the intensity of watching live performances!