Sunday Morning

Potts Point, Sydney, Australia
1 May
Sunny warm am
4560 steps (on Saturday)

Okay, so I saw this sign that said "Undercover police are patrolling this area for kerb crawlers," and I had to find out what is a 'kerb crawler.' You can look it up yourself, if you really want to know, but it has something to do with what Kings Cross is known for in these parts. And to the parents: we are officially staying in Potts Point, not Kings Cross. It just that Kings Cross is where the McDonald's is. And it's where this interne cafe is.

Yesterday was the day we introduced the students to the Harbor Ferry system. There are a few moments that are consistent across the different years that this course runs, and one of those happens when we go to Circular Quay (pronounced "key"). We board a subway at Kings Cross, transfer at the Town Hall stop to a different subway. All of this is underground. The subway car then climbs and emerges from underground, and goes above the Quay for a splendid view of the Harbour Bridge and the Sydney Opera House! It has never yet failed to take the students' breaths for awhile; we build a few minutes into thechedule so that the students can take photos of it all from the platform.

We use the ferry to go out to the Taronga Zoo. Again, we've had nice weather so far, and the trip out was sunny and mild, with little chop from the water. Getting into the zoo ran smoothly. This involves getting into a cable car that goes up a hillside to the zoo entrance. We then spend a couple of hours walking down the hill, back to the ferry. We let the students explore on their own, of course.

Last year, there was a lot of construction going on at the zoo, as they were installing several mega-habitats. I expected it to be finished this year, but it looks as though they have a ways to go before it's all done. They have finished the food court, an indoor/outdoor eatery that offers a reasonable selection. No peacocks attacking me for my meat pie this year (see the 2000 journal). I had a greek salad, it was okay.

There was not too much that was different from prior years. I always like the bird show, so I never miss that. We did find two echidnas in their enclosure. An echinda is a monotreme, probably most closely related to the duck-billed platypus. It's an egg-laying mammal, but unlike the platypus, it has no teats; mother's milk comes from sweat-like glands on mother's underside. The female carries the egg externally, altering her belly by muscular contractions to create a pouch for it.
Echidnas most closely resemble out porcupine. They're not exactly quills on its back, but rather short stubby pointed sticklike bristles -- you'd not want to step on one. When threatned, the echidna digs a little hole and hunkers down so that it looks like a little pile of stubbly grass. I can't imagine any predator looking at this as a tasty critter, so well-adapted are they. We had seen one last year at the zoo, and I think it's on the DVD from last year. The neat thing about seeing two this year was that one was camoflaged, as I described above.

In the afternoon, we took the ferry over to Darling Harbour to walk through the Sydney Aquarium. My faborite part of the aquarium is the reef shark tank. It's a chance to see some of the big sharks and rays moving around, as you walk through tunnels built into the tank. I could watch the big stingrays move through the water all day; they appear to fly through the water rather than swim, with their graceful wing undulation.

In the evening, my senior colleague and I went to the Sydney Opera House to see Influence, a play by David Williamson. Williamson is one of Australia's most prominent playwrights, though you may not have heard of him. He wrote the screenplays for the movies Gallipoli and The Year of Living Dangerously, and has written many other plays performed at the Opera House. The first year I was here, a student and I went to see The Great Man, and last year, my colleague and I went to see Amigos.
Influence is an episode in the life of a hate-mongering radio talk-show host: the dealings with his aging ballerina 'trophy' wife, his teenaged daughter by his first wife, his sister, his father who was secretly a Croatian war criminal from WWII, his chauffer, and his Turkish housekeeper. Many references to the world today, to 9/11 and its effect on Australians, to the influence of hate shows. It's edgy black comedy, and not for the sensitive. But I like his writing a lot, and hope to see more over the next few years.

I send a note of congratulations to the senior biologist at my home college, on the birth of her daughter. If you know Lynne, pass it along.
Today, I am going out to Watson Bay for a walk around, and then I'm going to see what the Sydeny Public Library has to offer.