Day 3: Welcome to the Wildlife

5:00pm –Well, the slump from yesterday is basically gone. Despite the overcast day, we all had so much fun! We just got back to our apartment to see India lose the Cricket match to Australia. Nice going, champs. Anyways, on to today.

Last night I decided to sleep upstairs on the couch in the living room instead of downstairs in the room Suny and I share because the sunrise hits our parents’ room so wonderfully, and the living room is right above their room, so I hoped for the same effect. The room Suny and I share faces the outside hallway, which has a glass ceiling above it, but drawing back the curtains would mean that you see people walking by, and even worse, that they can see you, and I’m not trying to be that awkward. I thought it would be so nice to wake up to the sun shining on my face like how I used to wake up almost every morning last year in my ninth floor DC apartment. It’s the best feeling in the world! But, turns out my parents like to wake up before the sun comes up, so I was woken up by their tea-making and phone-calling at the crack of dawn instead. Also, the weather decided to be cloudy today so...that was just an epic fail on all accounts.

Quite the dreary day.

After we all woke up and got ready, we walked over to Harbourside mall to pick up our tickets to Wildlife Sydney and the Sydney Aquarium, which we planned to visit today, as well as tickets to see the Sydney Eye Tower and tickets for a 24-hour hop-on hop-off double-decker bus tour. We really are such tourists. The mall has an information center that gives great deals for different tourist attractions, especially if you’re trying to see more than one thing in the city. Since we’re seeing practically everything, we’re really benefiting from getting our tickets there instead of buying them individually at each place. Plus, we get to skip the queues once we get there, which is nice.

Sydney Wildlife and Aquarium!

With tickets in hand, we walked across the harbour bridge to the other side where the Wildlife Center and Aquarium are. It was kind of chilly today! I actually had to wear jeans – cropped jeans that I rolled up to Capri-length, but still jeans. It wasn’t so much chilly as it was WINDY. Before heading out, I luckily grabbed my windbreaker and it proved immensely helpful throughout the day. I decided we should go to Wildlife Sydney before the Aquarium because I thought the animals would be awake earlier in the day, and fish are just fish – they’re gonna be in their tanks somewhere, you’ve just gotta find them. This was an awesome decision, if I do say so myself.

Okay, so I’m too excited about this to wait and write about everything that happened leading up to this moment, but I PETTED A KANGAROO AND TOOK A PICTURE WITH HIM!!!! His name is Seth and he’s the second youngest kangaroo in the park (there are four total) and he is the friendliest. I really wanted to secretly steal him and take him home with me. He could’ve taken Suny’s seat on the plane, but I don’t think his keepers would’ve liked that too much. I ALMOST didn’t get a chance to pet him since only 10 people were allowed into the exhibit (everyone else had to stand outside) and the guide had already given away ten hand-stamps to the group (a hand-stamp meant you were allowed to enter and pet/take a picture with a kangaroo), but I turned on my cute little kid voice and told the guide (his name was Charlie) that we came ALL the way from DC…and then he said he would make an exception and he gave me the 11^th stamp!! I was prepared to tell him how I am obsessed with kangaroos and have 127 stuffed kangaroos back home (actually, I don’t have any) and that I have been wanting to meet one my entire life and I would never ever have the opportunity to ever meet one again ever…but he was a really nice guy and just let me in. J My brother and my mom hopped into the picture as well, and I really wish my dad would have too. The guide took the picture on my camera for us, but my dad was busy taking it on his camera too? I don’t know, but hopefully I find a way to photoshop him in or something because I really love that picture and it’s not perfect until my dad’s in it. L

I learned so much at Wildlife today! I was most interested in the kangaroos of course, which can reach speeds of up to 65km/hour, at which point they’re basically leaping 10m in one hop! They can also grow up to 2m in height, but the ones we saw today weren’t as big. Some other random facts about kangaroos: a female kangaroo’s internal pregnancy time is only about 18-31 days. After that, she gives birth to this jelly-bean size kangaroo without any limbs or anything, and she cares for it in her pouch while it develops until she feels the little Joey is ready to come out. (The Aussies call a baby animal “Joey”.) Kangaroos also have really big ears to help them give off body heat since they can’t sweat like humans can. The biggest thing the guide talked about was how kangaroos become stressed very easily, and how Wildlife aims to keep them as stress free as possible. That’s why they don’t force the kangaroos to come over to eat when they feed them – they just set the food out and wait to see if they’ll come over. They also limit the number of people who are allowed to have pictures with them because they don’t want the kangaroos to feel threatened or in an uncomfortable environment. And if the kangaroos leave in the middle of the photo sessions, the guides won’t force them to come back. I was really nice to Seth though. (We’re gonna be pen pals.)

Compared to the kangaroos, everything else was cool, but not AMAZING like those little jumpers. We saw a bunch of other animals that are native to Australia like koalas. Contrary to popular belief, koalas aren’t bears –in fact, humans are more closely related to bears than koalas are. Koalas are actually most closely related to wombats, another Australian native. (If you’re wondering where you’ve heard the term “wombat”, it’s in Harry Potter. Just saying.)  We got pictures with the koalas as well, but those guys were sleeping nearly the whole time. We learned how to stroke their hind legs with the backs of our first two fingers, because that’s the most soothing and non-aggressive way to approach them. Koalas also have really stiff butts which help them stay perched in trees FOREVER. A koala spends about 18-22 hours a day sleeping and are quite anti-social creatures. In the wild, you might see a koala up a tree, but you most likely won’t find another koala until maybe 50-100 meters away. I have no idea how they’re supposed to mate like that. I should’ve asked…

Koala!

Sleeping koalas - we actually got pictures with these ones!

Another cool animal we saw was the crocodile. His name is Rex and he’s about 45 years old and a very “sexy” crocodile, according to the guide. Rex has every single one of his limbs and bones perfectly in tact, and is therefore believed to have won every fight he has ever been in. He’s also GIGANTIC – like nearly 5 meters long or something like that. The guide says he likes to think of himself as the king of the castle. He’s been at Wildlife for almost twelve years now and has gotten used to his surroundings. Since he has such great genes, they’ve tried to mate him with a female crocodile, but within five minutes of her entering his lair, he killed her. A year later they tried again and he did the same thing to that poor girl as well. Rex usually eats chickens but he hasn’t eaten since April and apparently that’s perfectly normal since crocodiles can go 18 months without eating. Their stomachs are about the size of a basketball and can’t fit much in there to begin with, in comparison to their size at least. Since they digest very slowly too, over-feeding him would just cause food to rot in his system. He doesn’t get hungry at all, but there are fish in his habitat that I guess he could eat if he wanted to. Crocodiles are very fast, aggressive predators. If anyone is so much as hovering too close to the water, he could torpedo himself to the surface and bring someone down into the water to kill before they could even process what happened. He’s definitely a scary guy, but nothing had me more freaked out than the snakes.

Rex, the "sexy" crocodile.

Speaking of which, we hadn’t even gotten into the freaking Wildlife building yet when we spotted a guide standing outside with a snake wrapped around her TO WELCOME US. She was asking if anyone wanted to pet the snake. I don’t know about you, but that’s not the way to entice me to move forward. Immediately I started rubbing my temples, trying to calm my racing heart while staying rooted in my spot, contemplating if this visit was even worth it. Suny forced me to move, so I stepped up a few centimeters, but there was no way in hell I would go anywhere near that thing. Suny and my dad decided to pet the thing because well, Suny’s batshit crazy, and my dad has his adventurous moments (like the random hot sauce sampling incident from a few days ago). I should probably add that the snake was sleeping, but STILL! It could’ve woken up and killed us.

If I had to make an educated guess, I would say there were like…three thousand different snakes there. I’m not even kidding, it just felt like there were snakes EVERYWHERE! Tiger snakes and water snakes and boas and pythons and whatever else they wanted to add to their exhibit to torture the hell out of me. All of them were behind a thick glass wall though, but you can ask Dudley Dursley how well those things work. :P

When we were all animal-ed out, we headed to the café between the Aquarium and Wildlife for lunch. I ordered a kid-sized meal of fish and chips which Suny found so amusing that he decided to take pictures of me while I ate and record me while I drank from my juice box. If you ask me, he could do with eating some kid-sized meals. I don’t understand what the big deal is. It’s cost-effective and it fills me up, so why not!? It’s better than ordering a dish that’s too big for me and letting it go to waste. Fact: I’m the only one out of the four of us who doesn’t have leftovers sitting in the fridge right now. My parents got the adult-size fish and chips while Suny got fish, chips, and fried calamari. The food was amazing and tartar sauce is quickly rising on my list of favorite condiments.

It was kind of awkward though, eating seafood and then going to the Aquarium where they preached about how we need to save the whales and all sea life in general. But then I wondered why this restaurant would be attached to the Aquarium gift shop…how contradictory.

We got to the Aquarium and there were so many freaking Koreans there –oh my God. This might come off as racist and stereotypical but, whatever. I have a disclaimer at the top of this page for a reason. Let me take a minute to explain how Koreans visit tourist attractions. First, they come in these mad huge groups with toddlers, teenagers, parents, and old grandparents. They all stick to each other like glue and all have to be in the exact same place at the exact same exhibit at the same time. It doesn’t matter if the window to the exhibit is one foot in width – they will all crowd around it and block traffic in every direction while pointing and gawking at whatever display. Then there’s the way they take pictures. They make sure that they get the most absolute PERFECT SHOT possible, regardless of how many people they hold up or how long it takes.

Besides just taking that one shot and getting on with their lives and letting everyone else get on with theirs, they come up with the most ridiculous poses. They’ve evolved beyond the peace-sign-waving-cheesing-like-a-cow motif (you know exactly what I’m talking about), and now every picture has to have a different expression or different action. If they’ve used it previously, they wait to think of an “original” one that is so overused by now that all you want to do is shake your head at them. Meanwhile, they laugh to each other over some overly-hilarious jokes in Korean that clearly have no interest or bearing to the photo.

Simultaneously, the camera-holder continues to take aim and hold up the camera, and not wanting to come in the middle of the photo, all the polite people around them will cease movement. Koreans also like to just stop randomly in the middle of a walkway to look at the pictures they have taken, without thinking of the people who might just ram right into them. One of these days, I actually will. On purpose. After taking the picture, they stand in a huddle to analyze it, before repeating the exact same aforementioned process to get the perfect shot.

Needless to say, having SO MANY of these groups at the Aquarium made this the most annoying visit quite possibly ever. Actually, I’m pretty sure it was just one group, but since we entered around the same time, they stuck with us for most of our tour, and if we tried to get in front of them, they would somehow just catch up. And if we stayed behind them, WE WOULD NEVER MOVE.

Phew. Good thing I have that disclaimer on the top of this blog. Alright so we couldn’t pet any cool fish or take pictures with the dugongs or anything like that (yes, Dugong is an actual animal, not just a Pokémon). They also didn’t have any whales or dolphins, meaning Wildlife >>> Aquarium…but we still got to see some pretty cool animals and learn a bunch of stuff. We were pretty exhausted about half way through the Aquarium, but we kept trucking along. It was my dad’s brilliant idea to do both place in one day, and since they’re right next door to each other we thought it would be a good use of time, but we just didn’t factor in how exhausted we would be in the process.

Photo op outside the aquarium.

They had so much art work made of legos!

The first thing we learned about was sharks. As much as the media and popular culture targets sharks and makes them out to be these man-eaters, turns out only three types of sharks out of hundreds actually eat people: the Great White Shark, the Bull Shark, and one other that I forgot. Yet, MILLIONS of sharks are killed each year for their meat, their fins, and other consumer properties. Back in the day, there used to be this process called “shark finning”, in which hunters would go out, capture sharks, kill them and cut off their fin, and then dump them back into the ocean. The fins were extremely expensive and used for something stupid, probably for stiffening/starching corsets or something like that, but so many species are now extinct or endangered because of these irresponsible practices. Sharks have gotten such a bad rep ever since Spielberg’s movie Jaws, but in reality, they’re not so bad!

I think the coolest part of the day was when we were able to go under the dugong and shark tanks. They have these two huge tanks, about the size of Olympic-sized pools. One has dugongs, stingrays, and lots of fish and things, and the other has all kinds of sharks with smaller fish, more stingrays, etc. There were even a few sea turtles too. I also saw so many Dory’s! They created these tunnels for us to walk through and we literally had these animals swimming all around us. It was such a cool experience! I took so many pictures that my camera battery died in the middle of the Aquarium. Luckily, my dad had his camera so I just took the rest of the pictures on that. Putting these picture albums together is going to be such a pain, but I’m looking forward to it! Suny’s been taking pictures on his phone and putting them online whenever we get free wi-fi, which isn’t too often, so if you’re friends with him on Facebook, be sure to check those out.

Since we were so tired while there, I honestly didn’t pay too much attention to anything besides the dugongs and sharks…and apparently the Korean people. I was also trying to stealthly give my dad photography lessons through our visit, but that’s another story in itself. The fish at the aquarium were very similar to the states and I’ve been to quite a few aquariums, especially while I was younger when I still entertained the idea of becoming a marine biologist. Last thing about the aquarium – apparently platypuses are native to only Australia, and in the entire world you can only find them in the wild off the coastlines here. But, of course when we went to see it, they had it removed for testing or something. There were over 500 species of animals or something like that at the aquarium, which is pretty amazing, and there were so many neat-looking fish. I took lots of pictures so you’ll see what I mean when I’m able to post them!

After leaving the Aquarium, we decided to forgo the bridge and take the long way around the harbour to get back to the hotel. Luckily the weather warmed up, but I still don’t know whose genius idea this walking idea was since we were all so exhausted, and taking the bridge, although it might have required more stairs, would have gotten us to the hotel much faster. In any case though, we stopped by this gelato place on the harbour called Gelatissimo, where we all got our afternoon sweet fix. I got a scoop of this flavor called Biscottio, my parents shared a mango flavor, and Suny got green apple. Again, I did my whole cone-in-a-cup trick, much to the attendant’s surprise, but I’m STARTING A THING HERE. Sooner or later these Aussies are going to be like “Ahhh, yes mate, give me one scoop of the vanilla swirl,” the attendant will ask “cup or cone?” and they’ll be like “Harleen-style actually, thanks, Joey”. Just give it some time.

Harleen-style ice cream.

On our way back to the hotel, we got to see the end of a street performer’s balancing/juggling act. He was balancing atop this teetering tower or stacked poles and briefcases, and at the top he had a skateboard straddling a briefcase as he held three flaming torches in his hands. We arrived just in time to watch him juggle the torches in the air, then promptly swallow the fire to blow it out. His final trick was to jump off the top of this tower, flip the skateboard on his way down, and land gracefully upon it. This guy was so amazing! This is literally what the guy does for a living – just goes around the world and performs on the streets to various crowds. He uses whatever money he collects to finance his trip to his next location, and just works to entertain others. He said he is originally from Vancouver, and he reminded me a lot of the guy in that Rachel Bilson movie who is essentially a traveling clown. (REALLY great movie if you get a chance to see it – I forget the title, but it’s worth looking into!) I had a soft spot for the poor guy, and even though Suny told me not to because he’s probably a con-artist, I couldn’t help but drop a few bucks in his hat. The guy’s got talent.

 Street theatre!

Alright so I think I’ve rested up enough while laying here. It’s funny how my moments of rest/relaxation are spent writing for my blog. My family probably thinks I’m nuts, but I really enjoy writing down what’s going on. Ever since starting a blog however many years ago, I’ve come to realize how much more I remember by writing my thoughts and experiences down. Honestly, some of the things that happened this past year, I really wouldn’t believe if I didn’t blog them. So, the blog helps in that sense as well as creating/restoring memories. Whatever its true purpose, I like it. Let’s just hope I’m still updating a week from now! I think Suny and I are going to check out the Kingpin Bowling Lounge place either tonight or tomorrow night which I’m totally stoked about. We’ll see how it goes!

Hoo roo, friends. J

10:00pm – Time for my evening update! As much as I like to claim that coming to this mall for free wi-fi is so convenient, the trek from our apartment, down the elevator, out the side entrance, across the small bridge, down a flight of stairs, through the parking garage, across another bridge, down another flight of stairs, and through half of the mall, is getting a bit tiresome.

So by the time I finished my last update and checked up on what everyone else was doing, my parents were both napping while Suny was watching TV. The local newscasters here, whether for weather, sports, or whatever they’re reporting, tend to be female, and not only female, but quite attractive females. I actually haven’t seen any male news reporters, unless they’re on American channels like ESPN. In any case, I’ve never seen Suny so interested in bird sightings in Melbourne…but he tends to watch the local news here a lot.

My dad eventually woke up and together we started to plan our next few days. See, before coming here, we planned out everything we wanted to do, but we’ve just been so freaking efficient that we’re getting two days of sight-seeing done in one, and we have extra days left over. We might take a day trip to see the Blue Mountains or something like that before we go off to Coffs Harbour on Wednesday. We even went down to the hotel lobby to solicit some help from the reception desk, but the elderly man working there just gave us all the classic tourist destinations that we already knew about. When we went down to the lobby, we took the normal elevator instead of the express elevator, and we realized why we had never taken it before. The express elevator stops at three places – the first floor lobby, the second floor because there’s an exit to the shops/harbour, and the penthouses. No other stops. The normal elevator, however, 1. Smelled like chlorine because some unhygienic weirdo decided not to rinse off after getting out of the pool, and 2. Stopped about seven times on our journey downwards. Never again.

We quasi-figured out what we wanted to do, but we were getting mad hungry so everyone got ready and we headed out to the harbour. Tonight was my day to pick since Suny picked the Japanese place  yesterday and the Thai place on Wednesday, so we walked all along the harbour, up and down, looking at menus and trying to decide what to eat. I was really in the mood for Mediterranean/Middle Eastern food tonight, but looking at the menus – the prices were so nuts! I’m not a fan of over-priced food, I don’t care who’s paying for it, and I’m much more a fan of good, cheap, delicious food. I couldn’t find anything that really stood out to me, and the Mediterranean food here is borderline Italian? I don’t know what that’s about, but there weren’t any tapas on the menu. The Middle Eastern restaurant had shisha and I’m not trying to die of an asthma attack while on vacation. So, I had been wanting to try Indian food while here, just because there are so many Indians and I was wondering if the food would be more authentic or white-washed.

There were two restaurants to choose from: a hoity-toity posh restaurant along the waterfront called Zafraan, right next door to Thai Foon, and a smaller, cheaper Indian restaurant in the food court of the mall called Pekwaan. I chose…(drum roll please)….Pekwaan! After looking at the menu for Zafraan, I wasn’t impressed, and decided to go for a more home-cooked feel. When we got to Pekwaan, we realized the workers were Punjabi, so my dad chatted with them for a bit as we ordered. I got Chicken Tikka Masala, my parents got some Vegetable Curry and Butter Chicken, and Suny got…a sub from KFC. Suny’s not too big a fan of Indian food, or really anything Indian for that matter.

I could NOT have been more pleased with my choice! The food was so delicious and definitely authentic Indian food. My chicken was the perfect amount of spicy, and I ordered raita along with it which was unusually sweet. I’m a lot more used to the thinner, more bland/borderline salty Raita,

Oh my God some weirdo is hitting on Suny right now. He just came over to me and said “every day I’m shuffling” and won’t get the hell away from us! I’m ignoring him and continuing to type. Suny asked him if he’s been drinking and he responded yes. I’m about to smack this man in the face. He’s giving Suny a shoulder massage? I think Suny might kick his ass…

Okay he went away. That was the creepiest thing that has happened to us thus far on the trip. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that my parents want to supervise me while I’m here.

In any case, so the raita was kickass, as was the rest of the food. I’m gonna finish this and post because I want to get the hell out of here. The guy just came over again and is trying to hook Suny up with a girl sitting behind us? I’m getting really creeped out! Okay bye love you guys!