Z penguins are z cutest.

Just south of Melbourne on Phillip Island, there lives a penguin colony made up of roughly 60,000 Little Penguins. Every day there is a "penguin parade" where the they emerge from the water and onto the beach after a long day of fishing. They waddle up the beach and into the brush to find their burrows in the hillside where they meet their mate and babies in order to feed them. Christine, Halley and I finally went to see this with Kim while she was visting and it is one of the cutest things I've ever seen. I mean, just look at the picture above!! How cute is that?!!

The sun is almost gone when they first emerge from the water in groups. From far off you can see their little white bellies bobbing to and fro as
they slowly get closer. The park has it set up so they walk straight to (and then around or under) the viewing platform. On their way to their burrows they have to periodically stop and rest because they are so fat with fish (some longer than others). Some were so damn fat that they could barely walk, which was pretty funny to watch! Every once in a while you would see one penguin come up and nudge a resting penguin from behind and the one on the ground would jump up and continue to waddle forward. It was all very endearing to see them helping and looking out for each other. As one group went by, others continued to come on to the beach. Hundreds of them coming in a constant stream. In addition to the parade, the air was filled with the tiny cries of the babies in the burrows calling for food. Apparently, the pareants can distinguish the caries and this helps them relocate their burrow. In addition to the babies, every once in a while the waddling penguins would let out a squeak or a sneeze. To cute, z penguins are!

We paid a little extra to get on the closer viewing platform and it was worth it. At times we were within a few feet of the parade and the burrows. There was a boardwalk along their main path where you could follow and watch them look for their burrows and even witness them feeding their young. Surprisingly, the humans or the soft lighting in close proximity don’t scare them.

The Rangers work real hard to make sure no one disturbs them and the park made every effort to minimize human impact, which was really great to see. We were so engrossed in our penguin watching that, at the end of the night, we had to be herded up the boardwalk by the Rangers (in a friendly way of coarse).

We walked away with a happy feeling after seeing such a lovely sight and feeling like we were so close to such a charming and beautiful natural phenomena.

FYI, there were no picture taking allowed so these pics are scanned postcards that I bought on the way out. Enjoy!!

Sweet!!!

As if going to the Australian Open once wasn't cool enough, I got to AGAIN on Wednesday! Our friend Ali found someone giving away two FREE(!!!!!) tickets on Craigslist to the 7:30 quarterfinals matches at Rod Laver Arena. We got to see world #1 Roger Federer take on #5 Nikolay Davydenko. It was a really close four set match with two tie breakers that had Federer coming out on top (6-4 3-6 7-6(7) 7-6(5)). After that match we were able to sneak down to the front row to catch some of the woman’s doubles.

Many thanks to Ali (the Internet Goddess) for the invite and a great time!

Whew!

Many apologies for the lack of posts in the last month.

Since early December I've written a paper for school, gone on a three week vacation to the Great Barrier Reef, nursed a few broken and sprained body parts, hailed the New Year, landed a job with the University of Melbourne Postgraduate Association and hosted my friend Kim for an action-packed, ten-day visit, which included a four day roadtrip to the Great Ocean Road. I'm just beginning to breath again. I now have three weeks of summer to do with as I wish before I start up classes again on February 17th.

Within the next few days I will post all the good stories from the last two months and all the pictures will be up on Shutterfly.

Until then, here is a taste.

A leisurely evening of whiplash.

This trip to Australia has been all about crossing off items on my proverbial "to-do" list. Well I had to break out the writing utensils after going to the Australian Open last week. For those of you that don't know, the Oz Open is one of the four "grand slams" of tennis (yes, I like tennis!!) in the world, along with the U.S. Open, Wimbledon and the French Open. We were all pretty excited that the Open was in town during our stay here so we jumped at the chance to go.











The way it works is that you buy the tickets for a certain timeslot but you don't know who you're going to see until the night before. We ended up seeing Maria Sharapova from Russia (ranked 4th in the world) play the American Ashley Harkleroad and then David Nalbandian from Argentina (also ranked 4th in the world) play Stanislas Wawrinka from Switzerland.







Overall it was a great time. We started off with nosebleed seats and ended up sneaking down to the fourth row for the second half of the men’s match.
















Kim and I courtside after the mens match ended at 1:00 in the morning!!

Snow?! Pshaw!

I left the house this morning to walk my friend Kim to the airport shuttle. We were greeted by a cool, crisp, sunny, seemingly carefree morning. The only indication that there was anything amiss was a slight campfire-like smell in the air. It took me a few minutes to piece together that it was from the 12 bushfires currently raging in the State of Victoria (8 within 100 miles of Melbourne and the closest being about 35 miles).

There have been stories of property loss, people dying, cattle dying, thousands of hectares of land destroyed and beautiful parkland consumed all over the news but until it actually hits one of your senses, it might as well be on the other side of the world (especially being in the confines of the city).

I imagine this must be commonplace for people around here but for me, coming from Massachusetts, the land of the occasional hurricane, Nor’easter or REALLY cold day, this is a new experience. The crazy thing is that Southern Victoria is one of the wetter part of the country!