After Sven came back from coaching basketball, Jason, Cat and I headed out to see the animal preserve to look at many Aussie animals up close. We got to see two platypuses swimming around the water. They are smaller than I thought (about 1 kg) and can hold their breath for 11 minutes. They have sensors in their bills that can feel small electric currents coming from the worms and other things they eat, and their eggs are less than an inch long. Also in the monotreme group, we saw the echidnas-we didn't get to see them eat ants, but they were cool! They have pointy snouts and otherwise look quite a bit like porcupines. When they are threatened they start to dig furiously and submarine down into the dirt until only their spikes are sticking out. When it is mating season, several males will walk around a female, digging a trench in the process. The one who gets to mate with her is the one who throws the others out of the trench.

We also saw kangaroos, wallabies, a Tasmanian devil and koalas-one was asleep and the other scratching himself which is unusual because they sleep about 19 hours a day. Perhaps my favorite part was the nocturnal animal house with tons of different little nocturnal marsupials with big eyes who were extremely cute and very active, hopping around all over the place.

After nearly missing our flight we made it to Hobart and had a great reunion with Pat and Angie, including a nice dinner at a pub followed by chocolate desserts and a walk to the waterfront. There we threw rocks into the water to see the phosphorescence. It looked like splashes and ripples of neon green spreading out into the water. We packed our bags for our upcoming journey and went to bed.

One thing that has been really interesting to notice in Australia is the ways that the press is different here. They are lots of investigative reports (which you rarely see anymore in large U.S. papers), and the war in Iraq in particular is looked at differently. They report daily on the approximate Iraqi casualties and give much more balanced reports of what's going on than in the U.S. where it seems reporters rarely deviate from reporting what press releases would want you to see. They even had an Iraqi girl on the cover of the paper under the top headline-she was being carried on a stretcher. It is strange to be here which we are at war-I get the Tikkun updates and I wish I was at home to make calls to the press and have an influence on what is going on. I am hopeful about all of the international outcry and to see how the press is here.

It also seems that corporations have much less of a hold on what people see and hear here. They have much more explicit anti-smoking campaigns on TV and the packages themselves say things like "Your smoking harms others" and "Cigarettes are addictive."