Univeristy of Sydney and the Royal Botanical Gardens

This morning I got up early and went in to work with my friend Carroll. She's the Faculty Manager for the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Sydney. I explored the university campus for a good chunk of the morning, part of it accompanied by Carroll, partly accompanied by Carroll's assistant Claire, and part of it on my own. U of S is a "sandstone university", which is the Australian equivalent of an Ivy League school. The older buildings on campus are made of sandstone and are done in Gothic style, so they're wonderful to look at. Unfortunately it was pouring rain for a good part of the morning, so I didn't take any pictures.

The coolest surprise of the morning was stumbling in to the Macleay Museum, on the university campus. This museum has been maintained in the old Victorian style, so it's in a great vaulted room full of wooden "curiosity cabinets", and houses a huge variety of animals, insects, birds, scientific instruments, aboriginal artworks, and much more. Check it out here at http://www.usyd.edu.au/museums/about/macleay.shtml. I had only expected to be here for about an hour but ended up spending a good long time there!

Once I left the university campus, I took a bus across town to the Botanical Gardens. The weather was still pretty crummy so I was planning on going to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which is located in the Botanical Gardens. But when I got to the Gardens, I pretty much got sidetracked immediately by all the neat trees; the Gardens houses tree species from all over the South Pacific. That, and the Gardens are HUGE! I spent at least three hours wandering around and I don't think I even saw half of the place.

What really got me sidetracked were the flying foxes! The Botanical Gardens is home to a colony of these large fruit bats - something like 11,000 bats in total. These critters are probably a little larger than our grey squirrels (not counting wings, of course) - so 11,000 of them take up a LOT of space in the tree tops! They were way up high so this is about the best shot I managed to get - on maximum zoom on the camera. Flying foxes are a protected species in Australia - they play a key role in the forests, dispersing plant seeds and pollinating flowers. But in the city they're pests, much in the same way that we have problems with Canada Geese. They damage the trees that they roost in (the branches in the tree here should be covered with leaves). But since they're protected, there's very little anyone can do about them.

Anyhow, before I knew it, the afternoon was mostly gone, I had walked about a zillion miles away from the centre of the city and had to trudge a long way back in order to find myself a train station. After all the walking of the past few days my knees are killing me - but I'll be back downtown tomorrow too, 'cause I need to finish exploring the Gardens and finally get into the Art Gallery. The best part is, both these attractions are free. Hooray for living a penny-less existence!