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

Darling Harbor

On our last full day in Sydney, we checked out Darling Harbor and then went to the National Maritime Museum. It was quite affordable for the exhibit-only ticket (not the ships outside or the special exhibit): $3.50 for students. The museum had a lot of stuff -- odds and ends of ship things plus the military aspects. I especially liked the section on stories from ship passengers who arrived in Australia as kids. There was even a Big Brother Australia program to get young boys from Britain here to work on the farms. And the White Australia policy wasn’t officially over until the 1970s.

Next we went to see Jurassic World for the second time, but this time in the "world's biggest IMAX screen". The theater was very poorly organized and managed, with masses of people and no crowd control, and they started late. But we still enjoyed the IMAX experience!

We wandered through a small Chinatown and ended up eating at the mall food court. D got lemon chicken and rice and I got garlic beef and fried rice. Meals were very affordable, plus they came on sizzling platters! We got gelato and sat outside looking over the nighttime harbor, then walked home. The city is very walkable, although it is warm when the sun is out but gets chilly when it goes down like anywhere else, which makes it difficult to plan for what to wear.

 

Grading, Seminars, and Dentist Appointment

My cat loves his pet bed and the microwavable warmer. I heat it up in the morning before leaving for school and it is still warm when I get back in the evening. I found a New Zealand supplier (pet.co.nz) so I didn't have to wait.

I really enjoyed Jurassic World and all of the science fiction implications. If we have time while in Sydney, I'd like to see it in 3-D IMAX! The ending is pure awesome.

Grading 30 essays was a huge pain and took me 3 days to complete. The good news is some students did a lot better than last time (not that anything in the class was about improving their writing) and there were fewer instances of plagiarism. However, some students did worse and evidently didn't feel like putting much time into their work. A lot of them clearly struggled with the essay questions, but only a couple sought my help.

Seminars & Conference

I won one of two travel scholarships to one of the Australia conferences I'm going to in a few weeks, so that was great news. They would like to present it to the awardees at the conference banquet as well.

I attended several of the Teaching Week seminars on-campus and learned a lot of good information on diversity, ineffectiveness of the lecture for student engagement and learning, and motivations and profiles of first-year law students. I feel like I'm being stuffed full of information which is all coming together with common themes.

The National Digital Forum held a one-day "barcamp" which is a kind of conference where the people attending decide on the topics they want to see covered, rather than the program being pre-determined. It was an interesting way of organizing. Attendees ranged from library staff, to academics and teachers, to students, to museum and gallery staff. We shared tools and resources, ideas on how to digitize content and why it is so important, ways of helping people learn coding and tech skills, and how to enable partnerships between libraries, museums, and students. I have quickly become a big proponent of Digital Humanities and the importance of turning the critical eye of the humanities to digital content and not letting the small percentage of programmers dominate the tech sector. I am looking forward to the international Digital Humanities conference in one week in Sydney!

Dentist Appointment

We had our first experience with dentistry in New Zealand. Apparently, it is uncommon to have dentists and hygienists work together in the same office. So when you go for a dental checkup and X-rays, this is performed by a dentist in a 15-minute window. To get an actual teeth cleaning, you have to go to a hygienist and pay anywhere from $80-$150 because dental things are not subsidized by the government healthcare system. The dentist said he would really like to have a hygienist in his office, but he has faced resistance from New Zealanders who think that it is a strange concept. 

He was a fairly young guy who has a lot of complaints about the abysmal state of healthcare, especially dentistry, here. He recommended American or British doctors because they will be more thorough and caring (threat of litigation still weighs on American doctors he said). He and his staff were telling me horror stories about their encounters with the healthcare system, like a family member getting metal in an eye that ended up rusting and causing permanent damage, all because the initial doctor said there was nothing in the eye (and the person can't sue in this system). I said they could probably be a millionaire in the U.S.! They also mentioned doctors giving wrong prescriptions and ignoring a woman on the floor in pain who clearly needed emergency medical attention. He was also upset that the government was trying to pretend there were no waiting lists for healthcare by pressuring healthcare providers into essentially hiding their waiting lists. It was all very disappointing to hear.