Our Pal Minty

Eirin and I hired a car for the weekend (I've decided to start using her name now instead of "E", so much for internet security) and took advantage of the rainy weather to go to the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary west of the city. It was a little hokey but fun for sure. We got to have "cuddle time" with Minty and have our pictures taken. She is pretty much as soft as she looks.

They also have an open range of kangaroos that you can feed, and was remarkably unsupervised. It was fun to have kangaroos hopping over to you and eating out of your hand, but a few of them get pretty pissed when you try to walk away and one of them bitch-slapped me in order to get my bag of food. Luckily their claws are actually pretty dull.







The other funny thing is that there was a bunch of guys there who were obviously band mates (I asked them, they were the Brian Jonestown Massacre) waiting to pick up their picture. On the wall there are dozens of photos of famous people holding Minty or her friends...The Pope, the Queen Mum, the Dalai Lama, Marilyn Manson, etc.). After informing the clerk that they were friends with one of the bands on the wall, she responded by saying "Oh really? Maybe if you come back someday we'll put your photo up there," and then handed over their freshly developed photo. Ouch.

I also got the opportunity to go down to Surfer's Paradise last weekend with a few Hungarian friends I made at work and had pretty much the worst luck. Not only were the beaches closed because of the Tsunami warning from the Chile earthquake, it also poured rain for most of the day. We still were able to sneak into the water for 40 minutes before being kindly asked to get out, and then drank the afternoon away at a strange beach club where you have to get a membership to enter (a strange phenomenon here). The best part was the meat raffle. When the lady came by with the prize that was up for grabs, I asked if I could take a picture:

Meat Lady: "Why would you want to take a picture of the meat?"
Me: "Because the don't raffle meat where I come from."
Meat Lady, perplexed: "But...then...what else would they raffle?"
Me: "I don't know...trips, money, people"
Meat Lady: "Huh."


Good times. None of us won.