Melbourne: Queen Victoria Market, Melbourne Museum

On our next day in Melbourne, we went to the Queen Victoria Market, which is very hyped in advertisements, and bought some fresh fruit, bread, cheese, and honey. It was surprising how many of the non-food vendors were on their cell phones the whole time, not even trying to make a sale. I think salespeople in other parts of the world would be very disappointed in their sales skills! I saw a couple things that tempted me, but no one was there to push me to buy them.

The Melbourne Museum turned out to be a great experience. It was the starting location for the touring Jurassic World exhibit, so we sprung for that and the IMAX 3-D dinosaur movie, although it turned out we had seen it already (but not in IMAX). The exhibit was short-lived but cool, with music from the movie and several animatronic dinosaurs, including a T-Rex and Indominus-Rex! I think it’s fairly clear many of us would go to one of these parks if it existed, despite safety issues.

Learned the origins of the names Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous

T-Rex!!! It moved pretty far, a couple car lengths from L to R.

Didn't know that Stegosaurus could blush their plates, or that their tail had its own 'brain'.

Hard to see, but on the left is Indominus Rex & on the right is the Stegosaurus.

Afterward, we checked out the dinosaur area in the main part of the museum as well as the human body and mind floor. The body exhibit had real preserved human organs, and the mind section had all sorts of interesting historical facts about how we study the mind. I wish we would have had more time and realized that’s it’s a good sign for an exhibit if it makes you want to stay longer. When I walked into the Jurassic World exhibit, I got that feeling of excitement regarding learning about science and was thinking how we really need to foster that kind of excitement and discovery in our students. Learning should be fun and interesting, especially in the Humanities! We don’t have formulas and stuff that has to be memorized before we get to the good stuff. All/most of our stuff should be good stuff!

There have been several significant fossil sites around Melbourne.

 

Skeleton images of a giant and a very tiny person.

The X-ray section was disturbing. It was an accidental find, but of course they didn't know how bad they were until later. It still bothers me that New Zealand forced me to have a chest x-ray to rule out tuberculosis before coming here.

 

For dinner we went to an Irish pub restaurant in Southbank where our server had an Irish accent, then for dessert went to the Lindt chocolate café. 

fish and chips; chicken parmigiana

brownie sundae

A lot of people here call it Macca's, but this was the first time we saw a sign with that name!

Melbourne showing its solidarity after the Orlando attacks. I appreciated this as an American abroad.

beautiful view of the city waterfront