Here are some really cute animal photos to make up for it. Who's doesn't get all soft and mushy on the inside at the site of adorable, fluffy Australian marsupials? I will take the effort to finish up blogging stateside, but for now I'm taking advantage of every last precious moment I have here prior to returning to the US.
This weekend after two very intense nights, which will be described at another date and blog entry, I went with Nabil and Christina for a 35 minute ride to Symbio, Wollongong's own award winning, family owned zoo, set in 16 acres of bush parkland
Photos of myself at the "Koala Show." For the Koala show, one of the trainers walks the koalas from their cages by dangling eucalyptus in front of them and then puts it on the below makeshift plastic tree, where the koalas eventually climb up and devour the herbage as tourist like myself take an obnoxious amount of photos and small children poke them. The Koalas didn't seem to mind, and were quite possibly the cutest creatures I've ever seen.
(nham, nham....delicious)
(Caption: What do you want? This is my branch...back off.)
The other highlight of the zoo was feeding the kangaroos. Myself, Christina & Nabil were by far the oldest people in the petting zoo, but I enjoyed it much more than any small child. The small child in me reverted back to the Little Farmer days back in Wisconsin when I and my siblings would beg my parents for quarters so we could get feed out of the gum-ball machines for the penned up goats. The $1 bag of grass kangaroo feed provided me with a solid 30 minutes of puerile behavior and upfront access to aggressive & clearly hungry kangaroos & dingos. These animals too had to put up with myself and Nabil putting the cameras in their faces so we could take pictures. In my mind, not a bad tradeoff: they get fed & I get material for my blog. I am not the first and with undoubtedly not be the last.
Peek-a-Boo & that one is sticking out his tongue at us!
When I mentioned they were aggressive, I was not exaggerating. The kangaroos would grab my hand with their claws and hold it until they were done eating the feed out of my hand. If they realized that the bag was full of feed, they would jump up on me, again bracing themselves with their claws until they got what they wanted. Case & point below.
Baby!
