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What do you have on your fridge?

More than likely, if you’re a parent, you’ll have a poorly executed picture of some kind of monster that your offspring has created and informed you is actually a portrait of you.

Otherwise you’ll probably have a pizza menu held on with some kind of souvenir fridge magnet.

What you probably don’t have is a sheet of pictures showing some of the more deadly spiders you might find around your home along with a short description and telling you roughly how long, if bitten, you have to live.

How reassuring. Oh, and it was only YESTERDAY that Sera informs me I should probably be checking my shoes for funnel web spiders and redbacks before I put them on. Great. I’d already been here 24 hours which, I now know for a fact, is easily long enough for me to have died already.

Fortunately I’m not dead. Just very, very afraid.

This isn’t helped by Sera’s continuing ‘helpful’ information service (‘oh, another thing to watch out for is…) which also enabled me to learn about her friend who flipped the sun visor down on her car only to have a huntsman spider land on her lap. (For your information, the huntsman won’t kill you, but is about four feet across and can leap tall buildings in a single bound).

So now I’m seeing spiders in every treetop, shadow and shoe. Thanks Sera.

Anyway, today was quite a day in that I finally caved in to pressure to be a normal tourist and went to a museum (The Ghost of Patrick’s Dad, you can leave now).

Fortunately, Australia being a macho kind of place (see Manly in yesterday’s post) instead of calling their museum something boring like The Science Museum, it was called The Powerhouse Museum.

OK, this may be because it’s sited in an old power station, but still.

The museum was, I must say, lots of fun, although I’m not going to tell you any more about it, because you kind of had to be there. Lucky for me I was there, so I’d just like to say the digital Tai Chi was supercool and made you feel like you were something out of Star Trek (something cool mind, not just a tribble).

Oh sod it, I’ll tell you about it anyway. It was a camera of some kind that captured motion and put it onto a large screen. So if you stood still, the screen was blank, but if you moved, an outline of yourself suddenly appeared in all these cool colours. So it was like you were appearing and disappearing at will (or, for all you nerds, cloaking and decloaking. If you understand what I mean by that, please stop watching TV and get a life).

So the museum was a big thumbs up, although to be honest it was worth the ten bucks admission immediately when we arrived after walking through the very hot morning to get there, as it was furiously air conditioned.

Then it was time for lunch, so we stopped off at a excellent restaurant in Chinatown for some Yum Cha (or Dim Sum as it is known to some of you).

This was a huge hall of a place buzzing with activity where the people actually brought different dishes around to you on various trolley and you just picked what you wanted (a practice you no longer see in Hong Kong, apparently).

Remember the opening scene of Indiana Jones, where’s he’s in that Chinese nightclub? It was just like that. Without the Triads, machine guns and irritating Short Round character of course.

Unless I was the irritating Short Round character I suppose. Hmmm.

Either way, after lunch it was time to hit an Australian icon – Bondi beach.

Yes, I know it’s just a beach, but still, this one is world famous so I had to go and have a look. So did everyone else in the southern hemisphere it seems. Or at least all those with muscles that they wanted to display .Yes, it was a bit of a posey beach, but if you’re going to pose (in your speedos or, as they call them here, budgie smugglers) a long, luxurious stretch of golden sand is as good a place as any I suppose.

Oh, apparently on 6th Feb 1938 there was a freak wave that hit this beach. Literally hundreds of people were dragged out to sea. As luck would have it, there was a life saving competition going on that day, so all the lifeguards headed out to begin rescuing. 250 people were pulled out of the water in total and only five died. To this day, this is known as Black Sunday.

It didn’t say who won the competition though.

So, after the beach it was time for a movie. Not just any old cinema though, we went to an open air screen with a picnic and a couple of bottles of wine in the park. As it got dark (before the movie, obviously, or we wouldn’t have been able to see anything) the bats came out.

Huge creatures, easily three feet across flapped over our heads in search of victims to suck their blood. Or eat some fruit, I don’t know, I’m not a naturalist am I, I’m a cinemagoer.

The point it, it was super cool, a lovely time was had by all and, this being the last day in Sydney, it was a great way to end the experience.

So, as ever, a big THANK YOU to my host, Sera Kiwi for sharing the joys of her new city with me and an even bigger PLEASE LET ME IN to the US immigration authorities who I will be encountering soon.

See ya.

posted by Peter The Great @ 11:06 PM