Strange things are afoot at the Circular Quay.
(Note: although “kwey” is an accepted pronunciation, the preferred pronunciation is “key”. Just in case my dad wants to make a big deal about this from beyond the grave.)
Strange things are afoot at the Circular Quay.
(Note: although “kwey” is an accepted pronunciation, the preferred pronunciation is “key”. Just in case my dad wants to make a big deal about this from beyond the grave.)
I forget, is this how you frame giraffes?
Or is this preferable?
I enjoyed this Imagineer-worthy theming in Southeastern Asia area of the zoo.
Goddamn langur monkeys. Just as obnoxiously loud as they were at the San Diego Zoo!
A meerkat.
The apes were all kept inside for the day. Truly, Gorillas in the “Missed”. (Look, they can’t all be gems, people.)
One of my favorite things about this particular zoo was the mix of zoo staples, like the elephants and giraffes and monkeys, and indigenous Australian species, like the koalas and Tasmanian devils and platypus and these (adorable) rock wallabies.
Few things in the world will draw my attention like a locked passageway overgrown with plants.
A pygmy hippo! A 小河马 (xiǎo hémǎ or “little river horse”)!
And the worst wildlife photography you’ve ever seen continues! This blur is a platypus. Just take my word for it.
Warner Bros. cartoons have misinformed me yet again. Looks like the tasmanian devil was yet another indigenous Australian species to be adversely affected by the invasive dingos, displaced (like the now-extinct tasmanian tiger) off shore to the island of Tasmania.
This aviary was colorful and beautiful and calm. (The exact opposite of being penned in with bats.)
Great, parrot. Don’t get cocky.
These Red Junglefowl are the ancestors of all modern domestic chickens.
I never realized cassowary were quite so beautiful.
I like this bird’s name because it posits a “Belligerent Dove” from which it must be differentiated.
Wait a sec. 蓝山丛林游览 (lán shān cónglín yóulǎn) means “Blue Mountain Jungle Tour”. The word for “jungle” 丛林 (cónglín) literally means “clump forest”!
Having established that Australia already looks a lot like San Diego, I appreciated this robotic T-Rex roaring with Sydney visible in the background.
What better way to celebrate my time in Australia than having the zoo ruin koala bears for me?
My fault for visiting in spring, I suppose, but the mature male seemed disconcertingly, um, rapey.Not anthropomorphize but all the other koalas & I looked on in horror.
Took the ferry across to Tarongo Zoo Sydney. (Tried—and failed—not to think of Turanga Leela every time I heard the name spoken in a thick Australian accent.)
I thought this logo was pretty cool.
Stan Lee, who knew that with great power comes great responsibility. May his memory be for a blessing.
In America, we think of World War II as the “big” war. The war the biggest impact. The war that shapes our self-perception as a nation. For France and Britain and the British Commonwealth countries like Canada, New Zealand, and Australia it is World War I which is the “big” war.
Millions had died before the U.S. even showed up, near the very end of the war. The adult male populations of entire villages, half a world away from the fighting, wiped out. Entire university classes wiped out. Psychic scars that persist to this day.
The armistice was signed on 11 November, 2018. I’ve never had the privilege of being in a Commonwealth country on a Remembrance Day, let alone the centenary.
Dan Carlin’s podcast had reminded me of a passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s Tender is the Night which always moves & horrifies me to read:
“That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”
“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”
“No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”
I, too, have grown up under the Romantic veil of Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne. But I’ve also seen the crater at Petersburg.
I fear that America has drifted through its own “century of middle-class love” and I fear what apocalyptic delusions that might engender.
Never again. Please, please, never again.
The main event! The reason I’m here in Australia! The wedding of my friend Evan from back at ODW on the beach at Watsons Bay. (named by Europeans after the British sailor Robert Watson who beached his ships here, but properly known by the local Cadigal people as Kutti.)
It was a unique ceremony: Jewish traditions but in English & Mandarin.
The reception was held at the Dunbar House built in 1837 (and presumably named after the Dunbar which was shipwrecked on the other side of the South Head peninsula, mistaking “The Gap” for the mouth of the harbor.)
Checked out of the Mercure Alice Springs, flew to Sydney, and checked in to the Sofitel Sydney Wentworth. Mercure, like in Oxford or Xi’an. Sofitel, like in Redwood City or Wellington or Chengdu.