Sept 13th - rain, fishies and some nice views

Hello again, and I would like to note that this is two blogs in one day, which for anyone who knows me, is quite impressive! So as I packed for this trip, my vision of Australian weather was a tad more hot than it currently was when I woke up to pouring rain. Instead I stayed inside and interwebbed and grabbed some breakfast and waited for the rain to stop. I always pack a rain jacket for rain when I travel, but it hardly ever gets worn. But, due to the fact that I live in San Diego (where it NEVER rains) and grew up in London (where it always rains) it was quite nice to sip tea and stare out the window.

Once the rain let up I began my wander stopping first at St Mary's Cathedral, which was quite beautiful with typical gothic architectural styles. They did quite well to capture an old look for a church that was only finished some 19 years ago as it took 130 years to complete. Apparently only something as grand as the olympics could serve as motivation.

After that I found myself in the old Barracks museum, a place where many of the original penal colonists passed through or resided in order to serve their time.  It was just a regular brick building with three floors that would have contained so many men who were essentially slaves to the state for the beginning period of the growing colony. While I have learned about indentured servitude and slavery with regards to United States history, I never realised the extent of the cruelty that many of the people faced who were shipped off to Australia for relatively small crimes such as burglary or fraud. In fact, according to the guide yesterday one of the most used architects was brought to Australia for forgery charges.  There were rather gruesome accounts of whippings that I thought would be unique to places with slavery (not that those were any less immoral) and not the treatment of criminal of ones own nation. Being hit so many times that it requires a 12 day recovery is something that no living creature deserves, let alone a fellow citizen. Thankfully, after a while in 1840 the people protested this form of treatment and Britain was forced to stop sending criminals to Australia. Unsurprisingly, the stigma lasted in that people removed criminals from their family trees and denied their existence. Recently, though, they said that movements were made to stop this and they had a search for your ancestors option in one of the exhibits. If only I had some cool aussie relatives to look up!

Next I took a wander through the shopping areas to look for some lunch and ended up near the sydney opera house once again. But first I stopped into a building with a cool model of sydney and had a cool exhibit on the Australian effort to fight apartheid in South Africa. Having studied the history of apartheid in school, it was cool to see the Australian perspective on the situation and what power they had to stop it.  So many things such as sports and embassy power and being a part of the commonwealth are unique to the Australian story and served as an interesting contrast to just learning the internal struggle in the country. Additionally, I just thought it was cool that the exhibit existed at all, since I've never seen something like that anywhere else that I have travelled.  

So then I found myself near the harbour going into the aquarium where the first exhibit had one of my all time favourites: the platypus! Surprisingly small (and awesome) it swam around in its odd little way and brought a smile to my face for the one time I did a presentation as a platypus in a platypus costume (hehe). There were some other cool turtles, fish, shark eggs, real sharks, a touch tank, saw nose fish, and jellies.  All of these made me happy! I was also mightily impressed with the amount that the aquarium really integrated learning about conservation and protection of many of the unique animals that reside there. The appreciation of animal before profit was moving and I felt more appreciative of the efforts after discussions of animal captivity in my recent dolphin internship.  Also random FUN FACT: sharks have to upheave their entire stomach to get rid of bones, which is why they prefer less bony things (HOW COOL)!

Then I had a nice dinner with a harbour view and headed home after a busy day. Everyone was walking in the other direction, clearly out to enjoy the nice saturday evening!

And that's a wrap. Stanford peeps come tomorrow! Whoo. Catch you all later! Peace