By Popular Demand...

At the request of both family and friends, and much to the chagrin of Katie, this blog is being temporarily co-opted by...me (Pheonix).

We did some pretty rad things during our stint in Australia. I'll jump right to Melbourne, because it was our favorite. It reminded us a lot of Seattle, maybe because we spent most of our time in cafe's drinking coffee, but we had some good nature experiences as well, as you'll see.

We started off our trip there by riding into the train station with no idea where we were or how to find the folks we were staying with. After a few ventures out to find an internet connection, and convincing Katie that she didn't have to embrace each and every bag to avoid theft, we found our hosts in the grocery store buying some beer. Leo and Greg are awesome guys with great senses of humor, and they made sure we enjoyed ourselves in their city.

Melbourne has tons of colorful graffiti and stencil art. Here is a pretty typical alley way:

And a few of my favorites up close:

Keep your eye out for a little graffiti zine we will be working on.

We also went to the immigration museum, which was fantastic. Melbourne is like the Ellis Island of Australia, and they had tons of history in this museum. Other touristy things we did included: having lunch in some park and walking through the Queen Victoria Market, a huge open air combination of flea market junk, organic produce, and live little chickens and ducks. I bought a tea towel with a map of Australia on it, and Katie tried to find a cool Australia jacket that would fit her brother, but they were all too small.

Oh, and we went to the beach. Seeing as how there is no ozone layer down here, going to the beach consisted of: rolling our pants up a little, lathering up in sun tan lotion, getting out our books and water bottles, and sitting on the sand for about 5 seconds before it got too hot and it was time to move on. We did, however, have a lovely walk along the water and found a few adorable dogs to play with. There were 2 little yappy gay boy dogs who just wrestled and rolled around in the sand, and a tough little girl dog who ditched her owner when we walked up and decided we were the only ones who could throw her tennis ball for her.

That was the beginning of the nature experience, where all the ferral little creatures of Australia came out to say hi to us. We saw wild penguins nesting in rocks, they used to be called Fairy Penguins, but out of respect for fags everywhere, some of whom apparently didn't want penguins named after them, their name was changed to...Little Pengins. No pictures, though, because it blinds the little things. We did see some fluffy little chicks, along with some swimming water rats.

We also saw kangaroos:

Unfortunately they don't stand still for pictures. But, they do just hop wild in the streets of suburbs.

We also saw a deadly spider:

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective), our hosts sprayed it with Raid. This picture is post-Raid.

We saw a bat just chillin in a tree in the park:

The best, however, were the 'possums, which we quickly made best friends with, thanks to a loaf of stale bread:

(That is a lollypop in my hand, which I pulled out of the mouth of a baby 'possom. Stealing candy from babies, I'm so bad.)

And that pretty much wraps it up. We are now in New Zealand to reconnoiter with my folks, I'm sure Katie will be glad to have control of her blog back to give her faithful readers the next update.

xo,
Pheonix