Photos from 2002 September 24
Today I spent the day wandering around Sydney, mostly running errands and getting things I would need for my trip up North. I also managed to find the science fiction bookstore I remembered from my last trip here. This photograph, however, I took in Epping, on my way to the train station. The weird thing was, when I was first trying to take this photo, there were two different birds there. They were white with pale red coloration, and I think they had crests on their heads. Somehow, during a few moments when I was fiddling with the settings on the camera, these two green parrots must have driven off the red and white birds. Perhaps this is the nest of the greens, and the reds were attacking their eggs. I have a feeling I missed some dramatic excitement.	These birds were all over the parks in downtown Sydney. Not quite as numerous as the pigeons, but clearly trying to fill the same scavanger/ beggar niche. People threw them crumbs just like they were pigeons. They also behaved like pigeons in that they tended to stay just far enough away from you that they could ignore you.	Here's another shot of one of these birds. It was sitting on the trash can, using its long beak to preen through its feathers. It was busy enough that it let me get very close to take its picture.	Sydneys version of the space needle. I haven't gone up it, but its my understanding that there's a revolving restaurant on top.
I was planning to go to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, but when I walked past the Australian Museum, I realized I'd never been there, and they had a big exhibit on Chinese Dinosaurs, so I went in there, instead. It was a fun natural history museum, that also had a very interesting exhibit on Aboriginal culture and how its been mistreated by Europeans. Did you know that for decades, there was a government program to take Aboriginal children from their families and place them in white homes in a conscious effort to destroy Aboriginal culture? They call these children the lost generation. But I wanted to talk about dinaosaurs first. The biggest emphasis of the exhibit was on how the Chinese fossils connect the dots between dinosaurs and birds. The display in this photograph was meant to show the ancient and modern relatives together. I had known about Archeopteryx, of course, but I hadn't realized there were many more feathered dinosaurs. Some couldn't fly, and it seems feathers evolved before flight, which makes sense. :-) What I also didn't know was that some species of (flightless) velociraptor had feathers. There was a model of what such a creature would have looked like, and it looked like a homicidal muppet. Jurassic Park would have looked quite different if they had gone with this kind of Velociraptor.	Here's a small beaked dinosaur.	Here's a big dinosaur related to the allosaurus.	This is a (dead) Coelecanth (I've probably mangled the spelling): the fish thought extinct for millions of years until people started catching them in deep water near Madagascar. This one was maybe four feet long.
This was a pretty neat looking early form of turtle, I think. I was particularly intrigued by the bony head and the heavy tail.	This was in the swanky shopping section of town. There was a pedestrian zone with several shopping malls branching off of it. I actually liked the interior decor of this one: wood paneling and the soft lights gave it a old-fashioned feel.	Classic park scene on a beautiful day. This was in Hyde Park. How many cities have a Hyde Park, anyway?	Walking south through Hyde Park, I came across this beautiful walkway. The arch formed by the trees was quite striking. They had set up an open photography exhibit along this path, with giant canvas prints hanging on either side of the walk. The photos showed various aspects of life in Sydney, with varying degrees of realism vs. photomanipulation.
At the south end of the walkway, it opened up to a reflecting pool, and on the other side of that was this building, which is a memorial to the dead of WWI, particularly the Gallipoli disaster. After contemplating it for a while, I walked on past it and to the left to Oxford St. I had bought a ticket over the internet to see the only showing of the new, restored version of Metropolis, and I knew the theater was on Oxford St. So I walked and walked and walked, and as it turned out, managed to miss the theater entirely, and had to backtrack about five blocks. Luckily I left myself plenty of time. The movie was amazing. Sure, it's extremely dated, and there were moments when the exaggerated style of the silent era gave rise to titters in the audience, and it's also rather heavy-handed in its overly simplistic message, but what a visual and stylistic feast! It makes so much more sense with the restored footage, and in an interesting choice, they added intertitles to tell you what happened in the sections where no prints have survived. I really really hope this comes out on DVD.
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