A Lovely Weekend in a Lovely City

Just having a great time with the legally required to be friendly Aussies.  Ok, if it is not required by law, then I am really confused.

What is more confusing?  The Aussies think that Americans are polite!  At least, that was the report of two couples I was chatting with whilst waiting for a Ghost Tour to start.   Lots of ugly deaths in the Rocks area of Sydney--the original settlement.  Good times.

But what is it about Aussies that get them asserting that they coined heaps of key phrases?

• Square meal (referring to the plates on a 1700s ship)
• Cat in the bag, referring to a cat of nine tails.
• Saved by the bell--bells connected to bodies buried but not perhaps dead.
• Dead ringer--ditto.

I learned a great deal at the Sydney Wildlife place :

• Kangaroos tend to slap fight.  They are not serious, because there are no females around over which to fight.
• They do indeed hop!  And even in a small area, they get going fast and are quite nimble.  
• They named the dominant male Shredder.  Or perhaps the roo realized he had a tough name and then became dominant.
• Koalas are even stranger than I expected
• They are not dopey due to Eucalyptus leaves intoxicating them.  They are dopey to conserve energy because Eucalyptus leaves have little nutritional value.  But evolutionarily speaking, if one can speak evolutionarily (perhaps not legal in TX, grammatically incorrect everywhere else), it is a decent survival strategy since no one else wants these leaves.
• Because Euc leaves are toxic, the mom can only get the kid to be able to digest the stuff by ... first giving the baby pap--mom poop--to eat.  I would spend the rest of my life stoned or acting that way if I had to eat my mom's poop.
• They have a backward facing pouch, which makes them closer to a wombat.  But I never figured out how a pouch can be backwards facing.

Latest lessons in Aussie<-> North American translation

• Fairy floss is cotton candy.
• Whinging is whining.

Travel notes:

• Restaurants tend to be really slow getting bills to folks eating alone.  Sure, because we liked to loiter by ourselves.
• I am faster than a ferry.  I wanted to get from point a to point b, and, as it turned out, waiting for a ferry to get around Miller's Point made less sense than walking up the hill to my hotel, changing and then walking down to the harbor on the other side.  Flash!
• Why was I outracing a ferry?  To get some Brazilian BBQ.  My first time ever.  And I think I will be digesting this meal fo the rest of my life.  Five kinds of meat, oh my!

And the night concludes with some travel-related TV by happenstance:

• Border Security.  A reality TV program where they show the TSA types catching folks who are taking contraband back into the country.  Strange outcome--woman stuffs food into every possible spot in her bags, quite forbidden, and only gets the stuff destroyed and a $220 fine.  Very much a slap on the wrist.   The woman bringing back heroin inside her body gets six years.
• Air Wars.  Shows passengers and airline employees fight.  Why did the airline agree to televise this?  The stories tend to make the passengers look bad, which is bad.  But when the airline looks bad, which happens a few times, that is bad, too.  I am very confused.