The Clown and Poker: Birds and beasts

We've been intensive house searching. At least we were searching intensively until Friday morning, when we got a call from a realtor. The woman who owns the apartment on the park, tied for the number one slot in Jonathan's opinion, has approved us to live in there. Yea! That phone call brought such relief! We have set up an appointment to sign a contract tomorrow, and our fingers are crossed that everything will work out beautifully.

So since it looked like we would have housing, we decided to take Friday afternoon and Saturday and do some more tourist things again, since Tim goes back to work Monday in California, which is Tuesday morning early here. Our window in which we can be carefree tourists is shrinking.

In any case, Friday afternoon we went to the Melbourne Museum, which is a natural history museum just a short walk from our hotel.

You can read all about the Melbourne Museum elsewhere online. To give the brief synopsis, since it's late at night here so time to be brief, the bug and insect room was pretty awesome. Many of the bugs and insects in the museum's collection are dead and mounted on pins. But many of them happen to be alive and crawling around. Beetles, bees, flies, many large spiders, and stick bugs all crawl around live in their glass terrariums. I left under the impression that Australia is covered in stick bugs -- at least the less urban parts. These bugs are very long and sometimes very thick. But they blend into the trees so you can't see them, until they fall onto your head and start eating your brains!

Actually, I don't think stick insects eat brains.

It appears that we took no photos of bugs, only a photo of this skink.

And this skink with a friend.

So here is a picture of a stick insect from Wikipedia by a guy named Peter Halasz.

This picture does not help you see the fact that these bugs are the size of your hand. Or maybe your forearm. Or possibly the length of your shin depending on who is asking. And when they are mounted on a white background, as in the photo, they are far less impressive than when you just walk by a pretty bush thing and then realize that there is very little bush there, mostly just bugs.

The parrots are camouflaged like that too, but less creepy, and not in glass cages. Outside of the museum, there was a lovely flowering tree, which seemed to be home to a large family of green parrots with red heads. The parrots are exactly the same color as the tree. But if you know where to look in this photo, which Tim took, you will see at least two parrots.

Saturday we went to the zoo. We didn't mean to spend eight hours. It just happened. By the end of the day, I was the one who said we had had enough. I was tired. It was time to go home.

Again, just to give a few highlights, the butterfly house was very popular. Here is Jonathan with a butterfly on his hat.

Here are Jonathan and Tim with butterflies on their hats.

Tim's hat was very popular with the butterflies. At one point, he had two butterflies on the hat.

And then three! You can't top that. We decided to see something else.

We enjoyed watching the orangutans. That upside down orangutan in the picture below had just picked up a large plant, with a muddy root ball, and whacked it at the other orangutan guy underneath him. Jonathan laughed and laughed. That particular ape reminded us quite a bit of Jonathan, actually.

What else? The birds were too aggressive at lunch. This bird, which looks very photogenic, is actually a thief. First it stole Jonathan's chicken nugget right out of his tray. Then it went after the chicken nugget in his hand, pecking his finger enough to draw a little blood and leave the boy in tears. Mean mean bird. I chased it until it flew away for good.