One thing everyone is supposed to do in Australia is to see the iconic Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge. I actually find this a little bizarre - I don't think of Australia when I think about great opera, and yet it is a theatre first and foremost meant for opera with a big bridge in the background that often comes to mind when Australia is mentioned. However, Wikipedia readily supplies a list of 81 Australian opera singers that rate an entry. There are 588 listed for the US. If you do the math, Australia seems to have twice the concentration of opera singers that rate a Wikipedia entry based on total population. But regardless of the concentration of famous Australian opera singers, the Sydney Opera House is indeed impressive, though not as bright white as we had expected.
We flew into the Sydney airport when we arrived, but didn't actually see any of the city until the Saturday at the end of flood week when we went with our Colgate class. Weerona was supposed to go that day, as well, but canceled because of rain and cold. It was a warm and beautiful day.
We started out at the Australian Museum, which now rates high on my list of favorite museums. It's a very old museum, founded in 1845, though planning and collections began in 1821. This was around the time that people were suddenly discovering how interesting Australia is and forming various scientific societies to discover more about it. Many famous scientists - James Dwight Dana and Charles Darwin among them - visited Australia during the first half of the nineteenth century.
The museum now is thoroughly packed with specimens and displays, ranging from a high-tech digital table display meant to scare you as snakes and spiders crawl out of nowhere to virtually attack your fingers, to a very old room of skeletons, including a domestic scene with a skeleton man sitting in a chair, his skeleton dog on the floor and bird in a birdcage, and a skeleton cat chasing a skeleton mouse. One whole room is dedicated to mounted insects and stuffed birds, which are stuffed into the cases to fit them all in. The stuffed mammals were also fantastic, and included realistic renditions of the thylacine (tasmanian tiger) and the diprotodon (giant wombat). It seemed sometimes they had specimens that they really liked but couldn't fit in a display, so every once in a while you'd see a stuffed dingo peeking out from behind a pole or a stuffed wombat watching you from under a shelf.
I of course loved the mineral room, and we spent a lot of time in the dinosaur room. Looking at a display on eggs, I noticed that the Australian Museum was displaying precisely the same model of an oviraptor embryo that is in the Colgate geology museum. Bianca pointed to the egg cast next to it and proclaimed that it looked precisely like the dinosaur egg that Colgate is lucky enough to possess. I expressed my doubt that a cast of our egg would have ended up in Sydney, but she snapped a picture and we compared it to the pictures of the Colgate egg later. After corresponding with several Colgate geology faculty members, it does seem that for some bizarre, unknown reason there is indeed a cast of the Colgate dinosaur egg in the Australian Museum in Sydney. The best guess is that the egg was cast by the Natural History Museum in the US before Colgate came to possess it in 1924.
I could have spent the rest of the day at the museum, but we headed to the Royal Botanical Gardens, another location where I could have happily spent most of the day. They've really done a nice job making the gardens spacious and pretty, and they're set right down on the water. The plant specimens were amazingly cool, and so different from what I'm used to seeing in the US. But I was just as interested in the "wildlife" we saw in the gardens (they were all wild, but exceedingly used to having people around). In the tops of a lot of the trees were "flying foxes," which are actually the largest species of bat in the world - fruit bats. They were mostly asleep but a few were moving around, and I loved watching how they used their feet and wings to get around the trees upside-down.
In one part of the garden, Richard and Bianca and I ran across a concentration of the ubiquitous and loud sulphur-crested cockatoos. A guy in among them held his arm next to a fence and a cockatoo climbed on, while another sat on the man's head. I decided to try this, walked up to the fence, and sure enough one of the cockatoos climbed right on. We had a whole lot of fun with them. We weren't, however, feeding them, and they seemed okay with this as long as they could chew on anything within their reach - hats, glasses, notebooks, backpacks, hair, ears, fingers... And they have STRONG beaks! You can still see the mark on my finger where one latched on hard. And another took my sunglasses off my head, and seemed likely to fly away with them, but Bianca took them away. After a while of standing there, they'd just abruptly arrive on your head or shoulder. It seemed as though they were just bored, and found landing and chewing on tourists amusing. It certainly amused us.
We walked out along the water to see the opera house and bridge, took a group picture, and that was about all we had time for that day.
One week later, Weerona decided that rain and cold withstanding we were going to go to Sydney. It was a warm and beautiful day. We did some wandering around shops and flea markets in the morning, and then split up for a bunch of different activities in the afternoon. Several of us opted to see the aquarium. It's built right on - and into - the harbor, and several of the large displays use water from the harbor. It was a very nice aquarium, though not as extensive as I'd expected. They had hardly any jellyfish, for instance. They did do very well, however, with gigantic sharks, rays, turtles, and dugongs (Australian manatees). And the tanks with large animals were split by glass tubes that tourist could walk through, which made for some really cool angles.
We got some dinner after the aquarium and then decided it would be fun to walk over the Harbour Bridge in the dark. The Harbour Bridge was a depression-era creation, and remains the largest (though not the longest) steel arch bridge in the world. When it was built, it was supposed to be the longest single-span arch ever built. Unfortunately, the Bayonne Bridge in New York managed to open five months earlier and beat the Sydney Harbour Bridge by 29 inches. I believe it is now the fifth-longest single-span arch in the world. Regardless, it's a very long bridge, and was fun to walk across. We spent some time on the other side seeing Luna Park, which is a small, brightly-lit carnival-like amusement park that sits on the water. Then headed home, quite tired!
I could have spent the rest of the day at the museum, but we headed to the Royal Botanical Gardens, another location where I could have happily spent most of the day. They've really done a nice job making the gardens spacious and pretty, and they're set right down on the water. The plant specimens were amazingly cool, and so different from what I'm used to seeing in the US. But I was just as interested in the "wildlife" we saw in the gardens (they were all wild, but exceedingly used to having people around). In the tops of a lot of the trees were "flying foxes," which are actually the largest species of bat in the world - fruit bats. They were mostly asleep but a few were moving around, and I loved watching how they used their feet and wings to get around the trees upside-down.
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