I left Sydney 5 days ago and just have a bunch of random stuff I didn’t have time to post about or didn’t want to individually dedicated a whole post too, so this is gonna be a clusterfuck of random thoughts.

Chinese New Year is a pretty big deal in Sydney. It’s a 2 week festival full of celebrations and Chinese traditions. One of these traditions is The Lion Dance, which dates back thousands of years and is meant to bring good luck.

Another is the Chinese Lunar Lamps, which represent each phase of the lunar calendar.

There are 2 more, the Cat and the Dog, not sure what happened to thise pictures though. The Cat lantern was hilarious though. This year is the year of the Rooster.

They also “painted” the city red one night.

 

I got tired of not seeing spiders (crazy, I know), so I went to the Museum of Australia and checked out the special spiders exhibit they were doing.

I watched an Australian tarantula get milked for venom and crickets get fed to a Huntsman spider and Sydney Funnel Web spider. Depending on which source you consult, the Sydney Funnel Web ranks anywhere from the most deadly to the 3rd most deadly spider in the world. They are the most deadly spider in Australia. They are extremely aggressive, but thankfully they are nocturnal. The male is 5 times more deadly (to humans) than the female, but only lives about 5 years. Around 5 years old, they choose a mate and the female either rejects the male and kills it or accepts the male, mates, and then kills it. The females can live up to 25 years and have long serial killer careers. Nobody has died in Australia from a spider bite since 1980 when the Funnel Web anti-venom was created. This exhibit left my Snapchat friends with beautiful images before bed, but actually eased my fear of being attacked in the shower by a giant spider.

Time for something a little more cuddly……koalas!! No, I haven’t seen one yet. We learned about them on one of my hikes though. Koalas are a mess. First off, they aren’t koala bears, just koalas. Like kangaroos, they are marsupials and have pouches. 90% of koalas have chlamydia and male koalas are deadbeat dads. After mating, the male sneaks out while she’s still asleep, never knowing that he knocked the girl up. This means that the males have no idea that they’ve had a kid….You see where this is going? When the joey (same as a kangaroo baby, Australians are lazy when it comes to naming shit), ends up being a female, it is not uncommon for the male to return at some point in the future and unknowingly mate with his daughter. I told you, they’re a mess. Here comes the real downer. Koalas are not high all the time. It turns out that the eucalyptus is hard for them to digest and doesn’t contain many nutrients, so the koala sleeps so much and appears lazy because most of it’s energy is used during digestion. Koalas are pretty rare to see in the wild, but I’m holding out hope.

Sorry for ruining koalas for you.

P.S. Tom Brady’s patronus is a goat.