The visitor

We had a rare visitor over the Easter long weekend.
Malcolm's been up a couple of times before, so it made the Maitland conundrum even worse.
You see, Maitland is kind of the reverse of "nice place to visit but you wouldn't want to live there".
I love living here, but when faced with the task of playing tour guide it becomes apparent very quickly that there's really not that much to do.

We'd already taken him to the old Maitland Gaol, which is still impressively forbidding:

After half an hour, I think Malcolm felt like a drink.
We'd also previously taken him to see Morpeth, billed as a "historic" town but in reality just a string of cafes and shops flogging overpriced "collectables". I think we had a coffee and went home.

So what else is there? The pub, of course! Our local is the Metropolitan Hotel, which attracts a regular crowd of serious drinkers. It's promising from the outside:

Inside, it's also attractive, although it's often very quiet towards the end of the evening, when most of the diehards are hidden away in the pokie room. This can lend it a melancholy air.
Okay, make that depressing:

Still, we were there on Good Friday and it was as busy as we've seen it.

After that we didn't accomplish much on Saturday, so on Sunday I felt obliged to show our guest the new Maitland Regional Art Gallery, which goes by the unfortunate acronym MRAG. It opened down the road from us last year.
It's an addition to an old technical college. I don't hate it, architecturally, but I think the signage could go:

At the moment, the exhibitions include the finalists of last year's Archibald Prize, many of which were remarkable merely for being bloody huge:

By far the highlight of our little artistic sojourn was the room dedicated to the art glass work of Julio Santos, a Portuguese-Australian. It was absolutely beautiful, with two pieces – objects-within-objects – that were nothing short of magic tricks.

How on earth he did this, I can't begin to imagine:

I think it's better I didn't.

Anyway, once we'd done that and taken a drive to Kurri Kurri for a desultory trawl through the bric-a-brac at Steptoe & Sons (after a detour to marvel at the Heddon Greta drive-in), we'd run out of sights to see.
Fortunately, Malcolm's a good friend and low-impact guest, the kind who requires neither constant physical activity nor cultural stimulation.

I'm not sure we'd cope with any other sort.