It rained quite a bit during the night, and a fair bit during the day - booooooooooo.
So, museum day it was today. I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art first as I could take the ferry straight to Circular Quay and walk over from the harbour. Love that ferry - so convenient! Especially as I bought a weekly travel pass on Sunday and have been getting very good value from it. It only cost $38.20 and I can use it on the bus, the ferry, and the train! Only in certain areas, but enough areas for me to travel around in and see the sights!

As I got to the MCA, there was a guided talk of some of the exhibits, so I joined that as I thought it might be useful.
We went around the Australian Drawings exhibit, which was actually really interesting. The guide told us that there had been a resurgance of interest in drawing fairly recently and the exhibit was just highlighting new talents and the different methods of drawing. There was two really great drawings that the artist had copied from photographs from the 1930s or 1940s, and she'd copied them using charcoal I think. At first glance, you would have thought they were actual photographs as she'd copied them so carefully and so minutely!
Another three really cool drawings were made up of charcoaled little people making up a bigger picture. Those were really cute and I wanted to take a photo but of course no photography was allowed. There weren't any signs up or anything and the little leaflet about the museum didn't say anything either, but another girl took a photo of something and one of the museum attendants was quick to go up to her to tell her there wasn't any photography allowed.

That's another thing I've noticed about Australian museums and galleries - they don't allow photography (which isn't unusual, I know), but then don't sell any images of the things you would have liked to have photographed!! I would have bought the Drawings catalogue if only they had put in all the images from the exhibit! However, they only put in one or two from each artist, so that wasn't really much good for me. The catalogue did have information about the artist and so on, but it was also really heavy so I just couldn't be hassled with it.

Other bits of the musuem were pretty good, however I'd missed what looked like a really good exhibit on the 4th floor which was a female artist that asked her friends and family for their favourite books and then made jewellery out of the pages for them! I thought it sounded really interesting, but it had acutally finished a few days before I arrived in Sydney.
There was also a Japanese artist called Yayoi Kusama and her exhibition was eye opening, and some of her stuff was really cool and some of it just plain weird. I think she'd had a troubled life and the image of her on the outside of the building advertising her exhibition wasn't exactly the most enticing. Imagine the face of a Japanese woman - very large brown eyes, quite a small and reserved looking face, and then this bright pink long haired wig. A bright pink wig, yes. Like one you'd wear to a fancy dress party.
She did have a couple of rooms that were cool - one where there was an ultra violet light in what was meant to be a typical living room. There was a telly, armchair, lamp, etc. but the room was completely black and covered in coloured dots. Of course there was also this ultra violet light and I happened to be wearing a white top that day, a white cardigan, and had white bits on my shoes! I thought it was a cool room in any case.
The other room I liked had lots of little coloured fairy lights suspended down from the ceiling, and had mirrors on each wall so it looked like you were completely surrounded by lights. It was really cute! A bit claustrophobic as you actually got shut in the small room (like a little box room - maybe about 5 feet square) for a few minutes.

I have been telling myself not to buy any more souvenirs, but I really just can't help myself! I've bought a couple of t-shirts already - one with the Opera House, and another with the cutest koala on it. It's actually a kids t-shirt but it just has a nice fat looking koala on the front and also says ' no tree....no me' and is meant to help people understand that koalas are an endangered species. A lot of their trees get destroyed by fire and so they don't have anything to eat as they exist solely on eucalyptus. Also, they only eat the young eucalpytus leaves found at the tops of the trees! Poor koalas.
I've also bought some really cute arty coasters that have 6 different Ozzie animals on them - koala, cockatoo, kangaroo, platypus, echidnea, and another one which I can't quite remember at the moment. I'll have to send my new things home (Ozzie post is getting their money's worth from me!) and probably some of my old things seeing as I'm carrying around far too much luggage!
A toy koala also found it's way home with me. Ooops. I had been looking for a really cute koala for a while. I saw one whilst I was in the Northern Territory called Walter, and he was really, really cute. Also fairly big, so I didn't get him because he would take up too much room in my luggage. He didn't seem to be sold down South either, as I hadn't seen him at all after I left Alice Springs. All the other koala toys looked cute, but not really cute enough for me to take home with me. All mass produced as well....until I wandered into the MCA shop and found a little flat one. They're called Flat Out bears, and he is ultra cute. How convenient that's he's already flat too, so he won't get squashed in my luggage!
I now have a toy representing time I've spent in each country (how old am I?). I guess I should have got one from Singapore but considering I only spent 3 days there, and I don't think they have any animals that are native to only them, so that's my excuse. I have a Hector's dolphin from New Zealand, called Hamish after the cute guide on the boat, and now I have a super cute koala. Just need to find a suitably Ozzie name for him now :D

After the MCA, I had a little walk to the Australian Museum. I only really wanted to see their Aboriginal exhibition there, as their other stuff seemed quite boring. They had lots of skeletons, minerals, and fossils and stuff which I really wasn't interested in. I did have to pay $8 (concession price with student card - yay for my student card again) to get in, which I guess wasn't really all that much.
The Aboriginals exhibition was fabulous and there also weren't that many people around so I got to have a good gawp at everything without other people getting in the way. They also had some sound recordings of Aboriginal people telling stories of bunyips and other tales. Bunyips have apparently been proven to exist, but who knows if that is really true!?!
I did have a bit of a look around the rest of the museum, with a quick walk through the skeletons bit, which was actually quite funny. They had the usual dolphin, shark, whale, etc. skeletons in little glass boxes, but they also had a horse and rider skeleton which I thought was hilarious! And they had a typical living room - dude in chair reading a book (that was missing though there was a helpful sign telling us what he was reading), pet dog by his side, cat in the background chasing a mouse or a rat down a hole!! I guess they had to make the skeletons part of the museum bit slightly interesting otherwise no one would actually go in there!

They also did have a dinosaur exhibit which was actually quite good, an extinct and endangered animals exhibit, and a dangerous Australian wildlife exhibit. I didn't stop at the bit about the snakes (yuk) even though I guess I should have but I just didn't want to frighten myself anymore than I already have done. What with sharks, stingrays, eels, leeches, poisonous spiders, lion fish, rock fish, poisonous frogs, mosquitoes, and snakes - I think acutally just knowing that they're there is enough. I don't want to know which of them is more poisonous than the other. If I get bit by one, then I'm probably brown bread in a few minutes and it won't really matter!
They did have a nice marine life exhibit though, which had a bit of barrier reef too. Not to the extent of the Aquarium exhibit, but it was still quite nice.

So, that was my museum day and I'm glad as the weather was terrible! Not sure what plan is for tomorrow but thinking about walking across the Harbour Bridge to see the view. If the weather is still awful, then it won't be too bad just to go for a walk across the bridge and then I can get myself home via the ferry and it won't too much of a hardship. I guess it's still tropical rain too, so it's not as miserable as being in London or English rain!

Also have to book the rest of my journey at some point soon. I've got a timetable and list of stops for the train to Brisbane, and if I leave on Monday, then I can stop off in a couple of places along the way. I think I'll stop in Coffs Harbour for a couple of nights, and then go on to Byron Bay for a few nights too. You can surf in Coffs Harbour (should be interesting!), and also snorkel and scuba dive in Byron Bay. I have planned on doing a 5 day scuba dive trip in Cairns after seeing it advertised in the JetStar magazine on my Sydney flight, but as I've not done it before, I really should try it out first!
The bulk of my journey will be on the train to Coffs Harbour from Sydney as that's about 8 hours. However, it should be a really nice journey as there's lots to see between here and CH. and then between CH and Byron Bay. I'm so much more of a train person as well, so I'm looking forward to taking it. Much better than sitting on a bus for 8 hours especially as it'd be all highways and roads and really boring.
However, going to Coffs Harbour might be more interesting than at first I thought seeing as it's actually been flooded today because of all the rain! It is meant to subside in the next couple of days as long as there isn't any more heavy rain, so I hope that by the time I want to go on Monday, it will all be over. However, seeing as Summer is coming to an end, the weather has become a little unpredictable. I'm still hoping to top up my tan before I leave (I'm looking very brown now, though my tummy hasn't seen much sun seeing as I'm not a sizzle on the beach person) so I hope I get some good sunny days up the Top End.