Cute Explosion

The weather in Melbourne, sunny one moment, raining the next, manages to provide a world full of rainbows a la my favorite weebl's song. However, also makes getting dressed for the day difficult. I have yet to get it right. I'm either dragging around a coat, scarf and umbrella  while being scorched by the sun on a 30 degree day (that's hot in Celsius), or tripping along in sandals in a sun dress, covered in goosebumps and a light sprinkling of rain. I've tried checking the weather online; that doesn't actually seem to help. If the weather forecast is vital to your outfit, you should only get dressed moments before its necessary.

Non-weather related events from the past weekend include a Saturday full of kids-activities. I headed to 'Scienceworks' to see an exhibit on Wallace & Gromit, the famed bumbling inventor clay-mation pair (<--One of their many movie sets). After wandering through the rest of the museum and hogging the funnest interactive exhibits (including a rock climbing wall, laser dodging room, and lots of optical illusions involving staring at spinning shapes), I headed to a North Melbourne playground to get in the way of other more suitably sized humans on a jungle gym. All in all, a glorious day of hanging out with fellow scientists who refuse to grow up.

Sunday, headed to St. Kilda, an urban beach just south of Melbourne CBD. It was a very shallow sandy beach with clear water, like many more tropical waters. Relatively clean, considering it's location, but we did notice quite a few invasive starfish in the sand and sea grass beds (hmm.. I may have to do a retrospective blog post to explain my knowledge of these guys). Regardless, we headed down the long pier and around to a rocky breakwater guarding the Yacht Club's anchorage for the big show of the night...

... PENGUINS! Yep, that's right, humans built a big pile of rocks to protect their expensive boats, and little penguins (that's their actual technical name) decided it looked like a great place to hang out and make their home. Now after making it into a non-natural nature preserve, building a viewing platform, and organizing volunteers to patrol the hoards of idiots trying to climb the rocks and pet penguins, folks can gather every evening at dusk to watch these guys come back from a day out catching fish. Let me tell you, 15" flightless birds are not the most elegant climbing boulders back to their nest, but boy are they cute flapping and stumbling about. Then they stand around scratching themselves and chatting to their neighbors while hundreds of tourists snap (flash-prohibited, and thus very blurry) photos. And they sound like retarded frogs.

Australian vocab:

CBD: 'Central Business District'. a.k.a. downtown
kiwi: not, a fruit, but someone from New Zealand
torch: flashlight (much less flammable)
thongs: flip-flops, ex: 'I was going to the beach for the weekend, so all I packed was my thongs'