Coooooooool Title.

Monday:

More of the usual. Animal feeding, cleaning, etc.

I fed the birds with Adam because Erin and Aaron were both gone. When we got to the budgies, we discovered that one of them was dead. Poor budgie.. Adam went in there to get it. He picked it up and was like, “Look! It’s not dead!” and starts playing with it like he was a two year old and the dead bird was his little action figure.. Hah. He was pulling its wings up and down and stuff. It was hilarious/disturbing/sad. I also had to go feed the pigs with Adam. Gosh it smells awful. I’m pretty sure anyone who goes up there smells like pig poo for the next three days.. Especially Adam because he’s the only one who actually goes IN the pig pen to shovel all the poo out and stuff. Anyway, we had to put more water in this big bin they have up there that they use to get buckets of water to give the pigs. So Adam was filling the bin with one bucket, and I was using another bucket to fill the pigs water thing. I came back over to fill up my bucket after a few times, and Adam decided it would be really funny to dump water on me. He was standing in the back of the ute, so he was above me. He complete covered my whole right side with water.. I got him back, of course. So we came back to the zoo soaking wet and had to keep working. It sucked.

Justine and I were both with Adam, and he was saying that one of us had to weed Marigold’s cage.. I did NOT want to go in there. Marigold is a scary bird. She drags her beak along the metal bars of the gate around her cage which makes this awful awful like nails on a chalkboard sound. She hisses. She screams. She snaps at you. She can also be nice (apparently..) and she will let people scratch her, but mostly she’s just scary. She likes Erin though. She will hop on Erin’s arm and stuff. Anyway, so I immediately opted for whatever the second option was. Haha. Justine had to go in there, but she didn’t mind I guess. Afterwards she was saying that there was this group of boys watching Marigold terrorize her. So anytime Marigold did something like try to bite Justine, the boys would laugh and Marigold would realize that she should do it again because it’s funny. Haha. Then later a big group of women came over to her and she was being all nice to Justine, pretending that she was a little angel bird. Crazy devil bird.

I met the senator of Tassie! Haha. He was at one of the devil feeds while I was there. He started talking to me and asking me questions about being from the US because Adam always mentions that Justine and I are interns from America. So I had no idea that he was the senator, but afterwards Adam was like, “You just talked to our state senator.” So that was pretty cool.

Tuesday:

Mmmm Tuesday was also uneventful. Mulching mulching and moooorreee mulching. I had to take these bags over to the mulch piles and fill them all up. I was meant to mulch the canaries and Marigold’s cage. Luckily Erin came to help before I went into Marigold’s cage, so I just had to fill the bags and Erin mulched her cage. I mulched the canaries cage. The canaries are so cute and little. Anyway, it was real boring and I was all by myself.. Rawwrrr.

I discovered that Azza won’t go into Marigold’s cage either. Haha. I thought I was the only one who was didn’t want to go in there, but Erin said something about how he wouldn’t go in there so someone else needed to take her food. He made me think I was the only one! He even made me go in there once while we were feeding the animals together. Punk.

Yeah that’s about all that happened on Tuesday. It was really just an uneventful week I guess. I fed the Joey, but I feed her like every day. She’s so cute. I decided to name her Leia. Erin said I got to name her. So I’m naming her Leia because there is a Harrison in the chook yard with her. I want to start calling Harrison, Han.. Haha. Also, I guess turtles as pets is illegal cause they are like a pest or something, but Erin lives by a swamp and found one in her backyard and brought it to give to Adam cause Adam has lots of pets and has always wanted a turtle I guess. Anyway, so he was trying to think of a name for him and after I told him that I named the joey Leia, he decided that he was going to name his turtle Jabba. Haha. So cool.

Wednesday:

I spent a lot of Wednesday weeding with Erin. She is a super tree hugger and she was talking to me about this new pulp mill that I guess is going to be built and how she doesn’t want it built, etc. So we had a nice long chat about how in the future it will be segregated between greenies and smoggies. Hah. So there will be water fountains specifically for the greenies and water fountains specifically for everyone else. Obviously the greens would be comparable to the blacks back in the day. Erin also spent a bit of time trying to teach me the proper way to say the o sound like Aussies do.

When we were doing the groceries, Adam was super hypo.. as usual. He started throwing rolls at Aaron and I. So I was throwing stuff back at him. We had a nice little food fight, until Adam finally yielded. I’m always more competitive than I think I am..

Adam told me that my teeth are very white. It made my day. Is that sad??

I’m obviously getting very lazy with my blog writing.. When I first started I think I wrote every single day. Now I have to write a whole week in like the few days after that week. Hmm.

Thursday:

There was a new girl working on Thursday. Her name is Lucinda. She’s very tall. She asked us how old we were and then said that she is seventeen and told us that she feels sooooo young around us. Thank you for making me feel extremely old. Anyway, she doesn’t actually work at the zoo. She is doing a work placement thing for tourism, so she will be working at the zoo in the reception area every thursday for the next six weeks. She wasn’t dress properly on Thursday though, so they had her work outside with us. Hah. I don’t think she was pleased about that. She looked SO bored the whole time because we didn’t know if she was allowed to come in the enclosures with us because of liability stuffs or whatever, so she stayed outside of the enclosures and observed. We were picking up poos in the dingo enclosure. Haha. What a fun thing to observe, yeah? I LOVE the dingoes. They are so cute. White dog won’t come up to me though, or anyone else for that matter. Erin left me to do their water by myself, and it’s this huge tub thing so I had to scrub it out and fill it back up. Red dog stole my scrub brush and I had to chase her around the enclosure for quite a while. Haha. It was actually really fun. They both kept hopping into the big water tub, so it was pointless for me to have cleaned it by the time I finished.

We did lots of weeding again. Well, really we had these big clipper things and we were clipping back a bunch of blackberry bushes. Those things are painful. Stupid bushes.. Anyway, it was something Lucinda could actually do, but I don’t think she was happy about it. Haha. She wants to be a flight attendant, so I she’s getting some sort of certificate in tourism. She has to do like three different work placements before she gets that though, and she got put at the Tassie Zoo. Sooo she was super bored outside weeding with us when she wanted to be inside doing reception area and touristy stuff. Poor Lucinda.

Leia gets fed three times a day now. I hog her and feed her every single time. If that’s mean, I don’t care. Ha. She’s my precious baby roo.

Friday:

Hobart day. Justine and I packed up and Judy took us to the bus depot. Judy is sick and she has a shaved head, so she wears a wig. While we were in the car she said, “Do you girls mind if I take my head off? It’s bothering me.” Obviously she was referring to her wig, but it was just a weird sounding question. Hah. So yeah, she took us to the bus depot and we went and got our tickets for our like two and half hour bus ride to Hobart.

I started the third Seven Keys to the Kingdom book by Garth Nix. Drowned Wednesday. I finished it in the car ride home from Hobart. Hah. I’ve read a total of seventeen books while I’ve been in Tassie. I clearly have a really full social life. The bus ride wasn’t too bad. We got to Hobart, but didn’t know where to go because Aimee, another intern doing an internship through AustraLearn, was still working. She told us to meet her at the post office.. Hah. We had to ask someone where it was and try to find it. We finally found it and Aimee told us that she still had to work until like eight or nine.. What the heck! So we walked around the city. We found a map and saw that they had botanic gardens there, so we started to walk there. It was a long freaking walk! It was like an hour walk or something. However, we stopped at this little memorial place that you can see pretty much all of Hobart from. Oh my goodness! Hobart is absolutely beautiful. There is a big mountain on one side and then water on the other. All the houses are on these hills and stuff. It’s gorgeous. Anyway, we finally got to the gardens. They were so gorgeous. They were a million times better than the gardens in Melbourne. It’s a shame we were too tired to want to walk around more.. So we only looked at about half of the gardens. It was so gorgeous though. So many great plants. As we were walking back we saw a gate that said “Beaumaris Zoo” (I think) and we were like, “What the heck? I didn’t know there was a zoo here!” We knew there were two wildlife parks, but they weren’t like right in the city. So we went up to the gate, which was closed. It had all these signs all over it that we started reading. Turns out it used to be a zoo, in fact, it was the zoo that housed the last tasmanian tiger ever. LSKDFJSLDK SOOO COOOOL! I couldn’t believe that we just randomly stumbled upon this place! I was at the same place that had THE LAST TASSIE TIGER EVER. My life is full, and getting fuller.

So we walked back to the wharf afterwards (Yeah, I didn’t mention that before. We started off by a wharf.. Haha. Oh and we found a huge moderny pirate ship looking! It was painted all black and was called the Bob Barker, heh. It was a ship for those radical whale huggers that go out and try to stop whalers and stuff. They had a list on a board outside asking for different things to be donated to their cause. It had stuff like tofu and vegetarian treats on it. Hippies.) and Aimee still wasn’t off work, so we went to dinner at a place called Hog’s Breath Cafe. It was a burger place. I had a real tasty steak sandwich. We went and walked around in Target after that. Finally Aimee said she was almost done, so we went and waited outside her work. We caught a taxi to her place and left our stuff there. She lives down the street from this little Italian place that one of her friends works at and she hadn’t eaten yet, so we went with her because we wanted dessert. I had the best dessert ever! They were little Nutella calzones with ice cream. So goooood. I had so much yummy food this weekend. Random side note: they don’t have pumpkin pie in Australia. How ridiculous is that?! They don’t even have the same pumpkins as us. They don’t carve pumpkins for Halloween! What a sad life. She has a friend who has a car, so he drove us and we went out for like half an hour before we all decided we didn’t really care to go out that night. So we went back and went to bed.

Saturday:
We went to this little cafe and got pastries and hot chocolate. I have yet to have a bad hot chocolate, and every hot chocolate I have is pretty much better than any hot chocolate I’ve had in the States. There was this one place that gave me my hot chocolate with the chocolate still at the bottom and I had to stir it up and it was SO GOOOD! We went to the Salamanca Market after that. It was so cool. Way better than Queen Victoria’s Market. Hand’s down. There were all these people playing music everywhere. They were selling all this amazing hand made jewelry and stuff. There was a stall selling jewelry made from spoons and forks, and it actually looked really cool. I wanted to buy so many things!! We got some tasty taffy stuff and “the smallest pancakes”. You could get these little pancakes with a variety of different things on top of them. We decided to be wild and got fresh lemon and butter on them. It was SOOOO yummy. There was heaps of amazing stuff. I could have probably spent all day there, and probably spent all of my money there. Hah. There were some guys dressed up as spotted tail quolls. Haha. It was awesome. My first thought was, “Oh man, I need that costume for next Halloween for sure.” They were passing out flyers to save some forest.

After the market, we went to the wharf to this part that has all these little take away places that are like boats and at low tide you had to like squat down to order and get your food. It was cool. I got some chips and gravy. Mmmm. We headed to the MONA next. Museum of Old and New Art. It opened like two months ago. I guess some guy won millions and millions of dollars playing poker professionally and spent his money on building this museum at a vineyard and buying a hundred million dollars worth of art. Aimee had been raving about the museum and saying we definitely needed to go. So I was pretty excited. I enjoy museums. This was the weirdest museum I’ve ever been to. Ha. They handed you these little ipods when you got in that have all the art in it and you can look them up and read more about them and stuff, which was cool, but it kind of distracted you from the actual art because you were looking at the ipods the whole time. Anyway, there was heaps of disturbing stuff in there. There was a whole hallway that was solely filled with molds of different vaginas.. What the heck? On the visitors guide thing they marked off areas that were inappropriate for children. Some places that were appropriate for children couldn’t be reached without going through the pg-13 areas. Clearly it wasn’t planned out well. The vagina wall wasn’t even the most awkward part of the museum. I’m not going to go into detail about the other weird stuff. However, I will say that there was this machine there that someone built that they feed it stuff and it creates poo. So on the visitor guide it said, “Feeding times......*insert time*... Poo times....*insert time*” Bahaha. So weird. There was heaps of real cool stuff there though. There was a “Fat Car”. It was a super nice Porsche or something that the artist had made fat. So it looks all lumpy and gross. Hahah. Anyway, it was an experience for sure. Hahah. We left and got dinner at Burger Got Soul! I had heard about this place from a few people. It was as tasty as they said. Mmmmm. I had a blood orange drink with it. I’m sad that we don’t have much blood orange stuff in the States. At least not at like food places and stuff. Maybe at the grocery store, I guess. Anyway, it was yummy. I love blood orange drinks. We were going to meet up with Erin Saturday night cause she was in Hobart as well, but she was at her cousins birthday party. We decided we didn’t want to go out, so we stayed in and watched a movie and played hearts. Haha. It was fun.

Sunday:

We decided that we wanted to get actual breakfast. It seems like they don’t do like real breakfast. They get muffins or pastries and stuff. So we found a restaurant that had pancakes and eggs on toast, that was about the extent of their breakfastiness. The pancakes were good though. We met Erin after breakfast and Aimee went to work. Erin took us to Bonorong wildlife park. It was a sweet park. It was real tiny though. They had HEAPS of kangaroos hanging out all over the park. I think there is a lot of inbreeding going on though, some of them didn’t seem too healthy. They had tawny frogmouths there! They are the silliest looking birds! I love them! If I had a pet bird, it would be either a tawny frogmouth, a rainbow lorikeet, or a yellow tailed black cockatoo. There were also potaroos there! They are silly looking. They are little wallabies I think. Real small with pointier snouts. We were feeding it through the cage. Hah. They had a cute juvenile wombat named Morris. They also had heaps of devils. After that, we drove home. I passed out for most of the drive. I woke up just in time to see this weird house that I guess some guy built himself. The bottom half looks like a little castle wall and the top half looked like the top of like a lighthouse or something. It was bizarre. It wasn’t huge either, it was like normal house sized. So weird/awesome. I spent the rest of the day reading and went to bed early.