Behinds and Blue Whales

We got a taste of local culture on Saturday--we went to a footy game. The Australian Football League (AFL) is made up of teams organized by neighborhood, so we went to see our own Carlton team play Essondon in what is dubbed the wooden spoon contest, the battle not to be the last place team in the league. We went with Jake's best friend from school, Tyler, and his parents, Jenni and Brett (see above photo). They are really sweet people and were great guides for what is a nearly-incomprehensible sport. It was a beautiful day, cool and sunny, and the game was at the Melbourne Cricket Grounds. The MCG is a famous stadium here, built for the 1956 Olympics and recently spruced up for the Commonwealth Games. It is grand (it holds about 90,000) and clean, but not especially charming. They play footy on a giant oval, like cricket, which looks very elegant after all the retangles and diamonds of American sports. Footy seems to have very few actual rules and even fewer fouls. It's total mayhem and it's pretty exciting. The players kick the ball, pass the ball (they can't throw it, but they punch it like a volleyball serve), run with the ball and tackle each other with abandon. There are 4 goal posts which make one central goal and two side goals. Kicking the ball through the central goal gets a team 6 points. The side goals are called "behinds" and kicking a behind (no joking) earns a team 1 point. The fans are loud, the players are volitile, and the whole thing is fast-paced and high-scoring. The final score was a tie: 105-105. I'm not sure what that means for the wooden spoon. Matt's comment on the whole thing was classic Matt (if you know about his obsession with sports uniforms): "We may not be good at world sports, but America leads the world in uniform design."

Yesterday we took Jake and Lucy to the Melbourne Museum, which is new, beautiful and very kid-friendly. The top two pictures are from that outing. Jake is standing in front of the skeleton of a Pygmie Blue Whale which washed up on shore here a few years back. I don't have the stomach Jake has for the natural sciences. The accompanying video of the whale's autopsy, which Jake found riveting, I found disgusting: it shows two men in rubber boots wading through mountains of decaying whale blubber. Lucy is riding an unidentified species of giant turtle. We also had a chance to see the taxidermied versions of all the native animals: kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, emus, wombats, tasmanian devils, dingos and many more. One detail I picked up which might interest Jeremy: monotremes, such as the platypus, are distinguished from other mammals not simply by laying eggs, but by laying soft-shelled ones. But this is probably pretty elementry stuff for a monotreme enthusiast.