My australia trip was fantastic!!!
Let me give you the highlights:
We got to see Melbourne AND Sydney!We took an opera house tour two days before the architect passed away.We also got to pet Kangaroos and Koalas! Kangaroos are surprisingly softer than Koalas are!We went to a place called Phillip Island where we got to see the smallest penguins in the world come ashore and return to their burrows to feed their chirping babies! (no photos of any kind were allowed, unfortunately, so this is from their web site)We went to Terra Bulga Rainforest (I had NO IDEA that there were Rain Forests in Australia) and I had wild parrots perching on my arms and head too!! It was so cool!Brings new meaning to "Parrot Head"We saw a few wild kangaroos and we saw wild walabees too! I was even 2 feet away from one of their wild ring-tail possums at a park in Sydney - nothing like our possums!The previews for that movie Australia (if you have seen them) shows the country being mostly dirt and red and bare - apparently that is the outback - in the middle of the country - there was nothing like that anywhere that we visited. It was all green and farm land with cows and sheep all over the place! Much like Wisconsin.The cities were short - compared to the Chicago sky scrapers that I am used to - sky could be seen easily anywhere in the city, where in Chicago some times you have to look straight up before you see the sky ;)Traralgon, a suburb of Melbourne (where we were staying with my Mom-in-law) looked like the midwest did 50 years ago. There were almost no buildings above 2 stories tall - everything seemed very small because of the lack of height :) Even the houses were short - everything was single story ranch houses - I didn't see many places that looked like a two story house. Our Cape Cod would have been a mansion compared to most of the houses over there!Most of the food was not great. They managed to screw up pizza. But they had these pies - kind of like pasties (pronounced "pass-tees") or meat pies that were really more like pot pie shells filled with yummy egg and veggie and meat mixtures. Almost like a quiche but somehow, better. Nothing like the icky pasties I have had in Wisconsin.And they had a bakery or chocolate shop on every corner!! MMMmmmmmm!Hope that's enough for now - I'm gonna have a cuppa and get back to work!!Anna
