At last: what I did on my holidays

I've lost enthusiasm for writing a lengthy post about my week in Sydney, but there's a few gleeful things I want to show you, so here's a bunch of photos.

The entrance to Tooronga Zoo

 

 One of the meerkats, pretending he's people

There didn't appear to be any otters in the otter enclosure,
 but there was a duck

It was rather perplexed by the glass. It was paddling like mad but going nowhere. It's pretty funny when you can see below the water as well as above. More zoo photos here 

 

 Matthew Flinders' sea-faring moggie, Trim, beside the State Library of 

New South Wales, near a statue of his owner 

The reading room of the library's Mitchell Wing is a light and pleasant space, but it doesn't come close to the grandeur of  Melbourne's La Trobe Reading Room

 The facade of the Mitchell Wing is not unlike the exterior of the 

State Library of Victoria

This carved inscription on the wall in the foyer of the Mitchell Wing was my favourite bit of my (short) library visit 

I like this sign at the Botanic Gardens, which are lovely

I didn't smell the roses but I took lots of photos of the water lilies

 Lotus pods

Lotus buds

A very tall eucalyptus tree in the gardens

 Iconic Bondi Beach - the Bondi to Coogee coastal walk was my favourite part of my time in Sydney

My first glimpse of Waverley Cemetery. See here and here 

for more photos of the cemetery and the coastal walk

 This SIGN made me CHUCKLE

 Coogee beach, the end of the 6km walk. 

Does anyone else primary schooled in Australia in the 1980s remember the ABC singing books and the song about "chish 'n fips 'n riko cholls, somato tauce 'n raussage solls"? 

 After a few days of stunning harbourside scenery I needed a bit of inner urban grunge. I spotted this on someone's front fence in inner city Newtown.  The cards were just little plain squares with 'To' at the top and 'From' handwritten at the bottom, but still...

A few doors down, I saw this sign

And this 

 And this, I presume, is Florian. Home safe, albeit legless 
and rather pale after his ordeal

While I was in Sydney, there was a report on the news about the corpse plant in the Botanic Gardens in Melbourne blooming for the first time in seven years. The bloom, which is said to smell like rotting flesh, only lasts for a few days, so you can imagine my irritation that it had the audacity to flower while I was interstate. Such impertinence! 

I visited the gardens on the day I got home not expecting to see anything (or smell anything). This is the sight that greeted me (click on the links above for comparison, if you don't know what it looks like in full bloom):

Teehee. Rather flaccid. Coincidentally, I just learnt from Wikipedia that the plant's scientific name, Amorphophallus titan,  means 'large, misshapen phallus". 

Nevertheless, it's still an interesting plant, and some if its neighbours in the tropical hothouse were interesting and unusual too, like this white bat plant.