NZ and AUS day 11: in which I take photos of flowers

After breakfast (today I learned that pumpkin spinach frittata is a thing, and a good one, too!), I walked Brent to work and then headed out on adventures.

Last time I was in Sydney, in 2011, I was with people the whole time:  T. and/or Syd and/or Brent.  None of those people at that time were as interested as I was in taking pictures of flowers, so they kept rushing me along as I went through the Botanic Gardens.  (Both kids now take their own photos of flowers, so I won, eventually!)  Today I had as much time as I was willing to spend to take as many photos as I wanted.

 

I like this one a lot:

 

I saw one cockatiel land on this tree.  I waited a bit, and a friend came, too.  Later I saw a whole flock flying, but didn’t get that photo:

 

I like this flower, too:

 

The interplay of the plant with the pot pleases me:

 

I took hundreds more, but that’s enough for one post.

 

Then I went to the State Library of New South Wales.  

It is a book church.  They have a Shakespeare Room with a folio:

 

At the moment, they have a great exhibit of photography from the 1840s to the present.  Here are a couple of photos I liked a lot:

 

I had some lunch in their very nice café before heading back outside to walk to the Australian Museum.  I really loved it last time I was in Sydney.  They’ve done a major renovation since then.  While I like what they did, I also liked it before when there was a whole big room full of skeletons of different creatures.  The present focus is on treasures from their collection, organized in a more contextual way.  The big extra exhibit was about Ramses, but I had seen it when it was in San Francisco, so I skipped it and looked at the other things.

 

Here are some butterflies:

 

Here is a fossil:

Here is some aboriginal art, which I deeply love:

 

I learned a bunch of stuff about how indigenous people in the Pacific were enslaved after the collapse of the Triangle Trade. By the time I got to the Australian birds, I was tired and maybe a little crabby (I have walked more than 18,000 steps today).  I headed back to the hotel and will shortly take a nap before Brent gets done with work.