Some observations

This is a free day for the students, which means we have no planned activities. That means I can sleep in, so of course I was wide awake at 3:00 a.m. It’s raining again; that might change the order in which Charlie and I do things. Right now, Charlie is Skyping with his dad. I wish I could find a way to Skype in Hyde Park. Everyone knows what a hotel room looks like, but you must see those fig trees!

I haven’t included all my observations in the earlier entries, so I will mention a few here:

1. Most toilets have two flush options.

2. Sydney Aquarium has the coolest sinks ever! From a distance, the sinks look like a table or a counter. Up close, I see the slight indentations under the faucets. The water drains through a slash in the back wall of the sink.

3. We had a two hour train ride to the Blue Mountains from Sydney. A large number of young school children ride the train in the morning. When we arrived at their school stop, I noticed two children in the same uniform already on the platform. Were they going to get on the train and play hooky? No, they were there waiting for their friends to arrive. That was sweet.

4. On the train back to Sydney, Charlie and I watched an elderly woman struggle with her cart on the stairs of a station. Two young men walked by her, and without a word, one of them picked up the cart and carried it up the stairs for her.

5. So, just an hour later when we were at our station, a woman was trying to bounce her luggage up the stairs. One of students grabbed a corner of the bag, Charlie grabbed another corner, and the three of them got the bag up the stairs.

6. As I mentioned in an earlier posting, the Blue Mountains were bathed in fog for most of our visit. At one of our overlooks, the fog lifted, the students’ cameras snapped away, and then the fog dropped again. Incredibly cool.

7. Throughout our walk in the mountains, I saw a plant with a flower that looked as if a cob of corn had exploded into whiskers instead of popcorn. I was at the front of the line near the guide for most of the walk (I am the quiz-master and so I need to hear the guide), but she waited until the last hour to answer my question. It is a bottle-brush banksia. Of course! Once she said that, my “corn cobs” did in fact look like brushes.

8. Due to the fog, we paid a lot of attention to the flora that was close. The native trees are not deciduous; none lose their leaves. However, some lose their bark. One of the trees close to me had peeled bark with an intricate design; I thought it had been carved. Charlie tells me the patterns are larva trails.