Extended Weekend

Weekends are something very prominent in the lives of Australians. On Friday evenings, people specifically ask everyone around what are you doing over this weekend. Thanks to the queen’s birthday, Monday was a holiday as well.

Saturday was spent at the Melbourne Museum at Carlton gardens. Entry was free(for students). Here I saw dinosaur skeletons/fossils for the very first time.

Look closely. There's a chameleon eating unsuspecting ants.

CSIRAC, a first generation computer. Aussie built. Still functional. The array of wires and connections were too much for me. It was beyond me to visualize how people could visualize the whole thing and how could the contraption have worked??

The indoor rainforest was impressive, and so was the mind section. But recorded Australian history is short, only a couple of centuries old, so most of the things on display other than those giant reptiles didn’t have the grandeur associated with ancient items. It was big though and was full of items, which were well-displayed, thereby making not-so-impressive articles look impressive.

Scienceworks was where we went on Sunday. We were clean bowled to see the whole population of Melbourne seeking entry to the place. The reason, it turned out, was a new Star Wars exhibition. The tagline said “Where Science meets Fiction”. I didn’t quite see them meeting though, but all the kids were enthralled to see the original movie costumes and models of space ships etc. For myself, everything was alien.

Guarded by tube lights ;)

There were other things as well. Some science shows and some more general science exhibitions. But everything taken together, Science City and Birla Museum are definitely better.

That day while returning, I saw GPS being used in Car Navigation. It was absolutely ‘bakait’. Kartik’s uncle picked us up in his car and he just had to type in the address of our place. GPS did the rest.

At night we went to Docklands. It was a posh area, and some light festival was going on. Pretty cool it was. SM joined us there. He and Pulkit tried to rope us in to go to a place called Ballarat Mines, where only the two of them were going on Monday. We refused. [And here I might as well slip in something about the Gentleman’s Club thing. That day, the two of them returned saying that it was a good experience but inconsistencies in their narration of versions of the events there led to some suspicion in Kartik’s mind, who closed in on them and then the truth was out. I will not expand it much, but in short they had a horrible experience there.]
While returning from Docklands we saw the Etihad stadium from outside and the Southern Cross Station. Both were a treat for the eyes.

The Etihad from Docklands

Queen’s birthday was zoo day for us. It is at walking distance from our place. Here I saw Meerkats and Wombats and Platypuses for the first time. But for Jai, other than the elephant, everything was new, - Tigers, Tortoises, Bears, Baboons, Kangaroos, Crocodiles, Chimps. Basically he has never been to a zoo or a museum in India. Infact he has seen neither mountains, nor seas before coming here. So his feelings were beyond my imagination.

Meerkats in their signature pose

Here most of the animals were separated from humans by a glass plate, and at places you are actually allowed to enter the enclosure, through a two door system, as in the case of birds, butterflies, and kangaroos.

At one enclosure, there was this funny situation with an ostrich running after a zebra followed by a giraffe.

At a lot of public notice boards local names of animals were given.

Just see the attitude!

Lemurs trying the 'sadhu' pose
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As expected all the three places were very well planned and managed. The Calcuttan equivalents of all three are actually richer in content, but the Calcutta museum and zoo will not figure anywhere near when maintenance and planning are taken into account.