July 2

This morning I woke up to some yelling in the street outside at 5:30am, and looked out the window to see a small group of men yelling at each other. One guy pushed another guy, and he pushed him back, but then everyone went their separate ways and nothing else occurred. About 10 minutes later, however, I was again awakened, this time to the sound of a sireny-sound followed by a recording of "This is an emergency, please evacuate now". Apparently someone had pulled a fire alarm in the building. We were all evacuated and made to cross the street. There was an ambulance already present, and it took about one minute before a fire truck was there. The firemen did their job and checked the building, turned off the alarm, and then let us all back in to go back to bed. Ah, brings back memories of college.

I paid this morning for 4 more nights at the hostel, because I received an e-mail notifying me that I wouldn't be able to move into my dorm until July 6th. I paid again for a continental breakfast, ate lots of good food, then gathered up my stuff to go to church and then birding with.

At church everything was kinda more formal than my church back home, and the windows were all stained glass and stuff. The entire service, including the prayers said by the pastor and deacons was all handed to me on a sheet of paper as I arrived. Kinda, weird, I guess. I'm not used to that. Anyways, it was a pretty nice service, and a visitor gave the sermon, a guy that's working with some local church youth groups currently. His name was Fuzz Kitto, and he had a good sense of humor. He had dark brown hair that was really fuzzy-curly, and stuck out in all directions. He was bald on top, but his hair was about 6 inches long, and his beard was all the way down to his belly. He also wore a black leather jacket. When he spoke, he told us that often he'll have people ask him what his real name is, and he'll reply "Fuzz". He said when he was a kid and hit puberty, his friends, and even his family started calling him "Fuzz". He said the name just kinda grew on him. After a while, he wasn't known by anything but Fuzz anymore. He then told us about how in the Bible, God started this great tradition of changing peoples names: Abram became Abraham, Jacob became Israel, Saul became Paul, etc. He said that he thought God was on to something, and so he decided to keep with God's tradition, and change his name. So he literally, legally, is Fuzz Kitto. His sermon was really good, and he talked about how we are all part of God's body, and we need to work like we are.

After church I walked across the road and under the highway (a cool tunnel footbridge) to Commonwealth Park to do some birding. As soon as I got into the park, there were birds everywhere, and new birds at that! I got to see lots of birds up close and personal, including purple swamphen (a chicken-sized black and purple bird with a red bill!), dusky moorhen, superb fairy-wren (little brown bird with a long tail that sticks up), Australian wood duck, Pacific black duck (really cool stripes on its head!), masked lapwing, silver gull, white-browed scrub-wren (acts a lot like American white-throated sparrows), brown thornbill, Eurasian coot, silvereye, black swan, great cormorant, darter (a fish-eating bird that swims around with only its head out of the water -- I saw one eat a fish!), Australasian grebe, sulphur-crested cockatoo, red-rumped parrot, and of course the other usual birds such as ravens, magpies, magpie-larks, crested pigeons, galahs, etc. It's cool how all the birds are not very shy, and can be seen up pretty close. It's also really cool to see parrots just wandering around in their small flocks in the wild. :)