Well the weekend was singularly uneventful, none of us did anything much except a bit of shopping. Which reminds me, I'm out of chocolate milk for my cereal.
It was raining hard when I got up today (it doesn't seem to rain not-hard at all) and Dizzy had gone to his first day at his new job with his key, Britta having left a note saying he'd be back at around 5:45 so if I wanted to leave I'd have to either come back after that or try to find the bookshop he's in to get a key from him. So after a bowl of cereal with regular milk (boy, you can really taste the uncooked dry grains when they're not chocolatey) I vowed not to return until late, having noted that the Aquarium doesn't close til ten o'clock. Taking my wide-brimmed hat and my orangest shirt (it's polyester so I don't mind it getting rained on) I headed via the train toward Darling Harbour again, site of the Maritime Museum which I'd been at before, and also the Powerhouse Museum (it's in the building where they used to generate electricity for the tram system or something, so the building is actually called the Powerhouse, which excuses the silly name) and the Aquarium.
The Powerhouse Museum, when at long last I found it after wandering for ages, was mildly interesting - there was an old train, an exhibition about steam engines, one about mid-19th-century shops and houses and some hands-on sciency stuff. That's as far as I got before kicking-out time (I'd expected this so it was okay), although the robots-and-computers bit that I missed looked like fun. It wasn't any better than alright though.
Next stop was the Aquarium, which was pricey to get into but well worthwhile. Loads and loads of side-view tanks with funky fish and crustaceans and weird underwater things that I'm not sure how to classify. There was a duck-billed platypus, which when I saw it was swimming down to the bottom of the tank to shake-chew bits off a crab-thing it'd caught, and then swimming up to the top again to eat them, and repeating as necessary, shoving a couple of turtles out of the way when necessary. There was a crocodile too, who clambered out of the water onto a ledge (a sign on a raised viewing area said "Stay Out - if the fall does not kill you, the crocodile will"). The best thing though was probably the tunnels through large tanks with sharks and rays in them. I'm pretty sure I was in one of these before, probably in Seaworld in California, but it was really cool nevertheless, to look into the mouth of a shark at least as long as I am as it swam overhead no more than a foot from my face.
It struck me earlier in the day that most of what I've been doing so far has involved museums - why haven't I been looking at actual sights? I guess it's because a place as new as Sydney doesn't have any interesting ruins or much in the line of historical locations. Of course if I was a kid I'd be turning up my nose at such ideas, so there must be plenty of other cool stuff to do on holidays - but maybe it's all expensive. Well I'll have to get around to SCUBA diving anyway, sooner or later, it seems a shame to miss out on the groovy underwater stuff Australia has just because I'm afraid of the sea or whatever it is that's wrong with me. And Dizzy has said I have to see the zoo, because it's full of the daft creatures native to this continent. And there's some parks and mountains I can go walking in. I'm at a bit of a loss as to what else to pursue though, I guess I'll have to get further than halfway into the chapter about Sydney in my Lonely Planet book tomorrow.