There's nothing quite like an aquarium for raising your spirits. And Sydney Aquarium is particular good. Not only is it massive, (giving it more spirit raising power - like a large planet has more gravity. I think.) but it also also all those comedy Australian creatures that are bound to raise a smile. Like the Platypus!
Yes, today I saw my first real live platypus. In fact, two of them, dancing about and turning cartwheels underwater like the crazy loons they are.
And the Platypus were just the entree (yes - for some reason here they use 'entree' to refer to your first course, not your second course or main like we do in Europe, so I'm using it here in the Autralian sense). There were sharks and seals and penguins and a very lazy crocodile.
Also quite an amusing sign over the crocodile pit: 'Do not cross this barrier. If the fall doesn't kill you, the crocodile will.'
More people were taking pictures of that than of the crocodile himself.
I tried really really hard not to learn anything, but somehow I still ended up abosorbing a couple of bits of aquarial trivia. I'll forget them pretty quickly.
Oh, one more thing that's completely irrelevant to this. A scary label to find on a bottle of wine:
"This product will contain traces of fish, egg and nuts."
Not, "This product may contain..." Oh no - it will.
OK, now nuts I can kind of understand, but how can wine contain traces of EGG? And FISH?!?
2 comments:
When I was in Japan I went to an aquarium. Next to each tank there was the usual speil on what the fish were called, what they looked like, where they were found etc. And then, next to that, there were cooking instructions.
Beer contains a "fining agent" made from fish gall bladders which gets rid of any cloudyness. One for the non-drinkers among us to crow about, definitely!
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