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A Whole Day Of Education

Melbourne, Australia


I spent last weekend in Melbourne in a desperate bid to halt the slow deterioration of my thought processes brought on by an acute lack of Things To Do.
We'd planned to go to Healesville Sanctuary ($22, probably only worth it if its sunny and you can do the whole day)[/i> in Yarra Valley and even though it was raining when we woke up we borrowed Natalie's car (smaller and cheaper to run than ours) and decided to go anyway. Y'know, maybe it would stop raining after a while, right?

.... Right?

No, apparently not. It rained constantly all the way there and for the entire time we walked round so we found things to do that involved standing under shelters and learning about stuff.

Koalas
Koalas are the students of the animal world, they sleep for 20 hours a day and spend the other four hours eating food that has no nutritional value which is a bit like me spending four hours eating Pot Noodles before passing out for 20 hours straight.

Maybe I was a koala in a previous life, that would explain alot.

Platypus
We just missed the platypus talk but from what I gathered they look weird and they smell. That is all I learned about platypuseseses. See, I didn't even get to learn what the plural was.

Reptiles
I pushed my way to the front for the reptile talk making sure that the small children knew that my elbow was roughly the same height as their face and I wasn't afraid to enforce that knowledge if they tried to steal my place.
We learnt all kinds of exciting and useful things such as how to treat a snake bite and not to stand in front of a monitor lizard while it's being shown round in case it poos. I learnt the latter the hard way.

We also learnt that lizard poo stinks, I mean really, [i>really[/i> stinks and the smell sticks to you and grows and eventually you're surrounded by this aura of Inside Of A Lizard which is impossible to escape from until you incinerate your clothes and remove the top layer of your skin with a wire brush or at least have a proper wash with soap and everything.

And the learning didn't stop with Healesville Sanctuary, it was when we stopped for petrol on the way home that we learnt that the worst time to lock yourself out of a car is after 5pm on a Saturday when it's not your car, both mobile phones are in aforementioned car and one of you has just been pooed on by a lizard.

It doesn't help when neither of the staff members at the petrol station have been employed for their innovation or intelligence and no one in the world will admit to knowing how to break into a car with a wire coathanger. I thought it was a stroke of genius that we even managed to obtain a wire coathanger at 5.30pm on a Saturday somewhere on the outskirts of Melbourne but there's a subtle difference between actually having a wire coathanger and knowing how to use it for purposes other than hanging things.

After about two hours of battling with the coathanger and pleading with the staff for some kind of help we caved in and joined the RACV (breakdown service) which cost $175 and it was just as Emma hung up the phone that the woman behind the counter handed us a card for a locksmith with the words, "Last time someone locked themselves out of their car the locksmiths that came out gave us this card in case anyone else did the same thing."

I quickly lead Emma away before the other girl learnt what it felt like to have all her teeth removed by force.

permalink written by  Koala Bear on July 22, 2006 from Melbourne, Australia
from the travel blog: Sod Off Great Big Mission Round Oz
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