Friday was a holiday here so I stayed home from work. Katka and I went to Bondi Beach again while Misa stayed home to work on homeschool. We did the cliff top walk from Bondi Beach to Bronte Beach. It was another spectacular day, bright sunshine and beautiful colors. The coast in this area is alternating rocks and beaches, so you get both the crashing of the waves on the rocks and the beautiful white sand beaches.
Friday night we went to see a rugby game. It was the Wests Tigers versus Brisbane Broncos. Now in Australia there are two types of rugby, rugby league and rugby union. Before we left for Australia I had two friends come over to watch rugby so they could explain the rules and strategy. I got a pretty good understanding of it when one friend said, "did you know there is another kind of rugby? It isn't as much fun, each possession is like a down, and they get 6 downs to try and score before they kick it to the other team." I wanted to be sure I went to the proper type of rugby, so before we picked a game I went on Wikipedia and looked it up. The two types are Rugby Union and Rugby League. I read a little on Wikipedia and basically it says that Rugby League is simpler and has more action. So we went to see a Rugby League game. Well, Rugby League might have more action, but it is like a game of Red Rover for grownups. One team has the ball, and the other team lines up about 10 yards away. Then the team with the ball sends one guy to run into the line of the other team to try and break through. Of course he doesn't, he gets tackled, and the teams line up and another guy tries to break through the line. This happens 6 times before they kick the ball to the other team. Every once in a while the guy with the ball trying to break through the line pitches it to another player for him to try and break through, but that is about as exciting as it gets. On each play there are 5-6 players participating, and the other 20 or so watching. In the game Friday night half the the scores came when the team fielding the kick wasn't able to catch it and the kicking team ran down the field, picked up the ball, and ran it into the end zone. It turns out that Rugby League is what my friend was warning me about, and what I learned before we left is Rugby Union. But it doesn't really matter because we had fun just being there, the excitement of the crowd, the halftime entertainment, the comments of the people sitting around us, and the exhibition of baby farm animals outside the stadium before the game (?). With time it will be even more special, because who do you know that has ever been to a Rugby League game?
Saturday Misa and I went to the Koala Park in North Sydney so Katka could write. The Koala Park is a small zoo we discovered last time we were here. They don't have many different types of animals, all native to Australia, but because it is so small you can get right up close to the animals, and you can feed the kangaroos. We went to three good keeper presentations, one on koalas where we got to pet a koala, one on sheep shearing, boomerangs, and sheep dogs, and the third on the little blue penguins that live in Australia. Misa loves feeding the kangaroos, and we were there at the end of the day when all of the kangaroos stood up and turned toward the gate, as if on alert for danger. I turned on my video camera because they were all looking toward me and it seemed like something was going to happen. Misa walked up and asked, "why are they are all standing up?" Then she turned around and said, "look, a koala!" And climbing into the kangaroo pen was a koala. It didn't pay us any attention as it walked right past us, climbed a fence, walked across the top of the fence for a while, and then climbed down the fence to get to a tree on the other side. It climbed the tree and started eating; I guess it was hungry and out of the 100 trees in the zoo it picked that one for supper. The whole time we could have reached out and touched it, and it completely ignored us. I guess there are few predators for koalas, because they are completely unafraid. It was one of the neatest things I've seen, and special because in this huge kangaroo pen it was just Misa, me, the koala, and a bunch of curios kangaroos. The video I have is perfect.
Of course life has trade offs, and because we watched the koala we missed the bus that would take us to the train station. Our choice was to wait another hour or walk to the station. We walked, but it was at least two miles up and down hills. By the time we got to our apartment at 7:00 Misa was exhausted. We were supposed to finish homeschool, but we'll have to do it on Sunday instead.
