our easter long weekend + some choice bean-speak

friday circus
we've just had a rather busy long weekend. it was the easter break and we began by going down to darling harbour for the hoopla! festival on friday afternoon. the fest is/was essentially a gathering of different street juggling/ acrobatics/ magic acts.

there was a 'big tent' where free performances were put on every 2 hours or so, and we managed to catch one act, which could be italian or albanian or gypsy. the most notable part of this couple's act seemed to be how the female half was able to contort her body to fit inside a smallish acrylic see-through box (with lid). w-o-w...

we also managed to watch some bits of a dance/acrobatics performance. a group of 4 men and a girl did rap-style street dancing combined with some human pyramid-type formations. all quite impressive but i was sorely tempted to yell at one of the performers to tie his hair up. it was long, shaggy and flopped everywhere. thinking of the heat and how sweaty he was, it made me wince with distaste whenever it was his turn to perform.

one of the more impressive acts we caught was a french-canadian who cracked lame jokes, usually at the expense of the audience members. his act was of the lying on long, sharp nails, swallowing flaming batons and juggling nasty, short swords variety. not bad overall and we rewarded him with some dosh at the end. oh, the box in which he keeps his paraphernalia is shaped like a coffin, and we did wonder how he managed to clear all the rather sensitive items through customs.

there was also a mime artist. she had greasepaint on her face, wore a ruby-red lampshade on her head and was garbed in semi-victorian dress. she seemed rather taken with the bean (who was sitting on her daddy's shoulders) and blew kisses at her. the bean similarly blew kisses back at her with both hands and waved goodbye.

as we walked off though, the bean remarked excitedly to her daddy,
"she's white! she can't talk! she's a may-leeyan dad!" (may-leeyan = alien)

saturday mammoths
the next afternoon, almost on a whim, we went to the australian museum for the special once-off woolly mammoths exhibit. the museum is perhaps the bean's current favourite place. she loves the dinosaur fossils upstairs and also likes touching all the stuffed animals poised around the place.

she seems to have an obsession with death and has been asking nearly daily, "why do dinosaurs die out?"

anyway, after coming back from looking at the mammoths, the bean decided that one of her toy elephants is also a mammoth. and her question morphed into, "how do the mammoths die out?"

p/s. once, after we had given her the theories for how the dinosaurs became extinct, the bean asked, "how did nanny and dordon die?" she seemed very thoughtful at the answers we gave her and was a bit concerned that people she loved would eventually die too.

sunday easter show
we tried to rise early for the sydney royal easter show, but alas, only managed to get there around 10.30am. i think the bean expected a large easter bunny to be prancing around shoving chocolate eggs at everybody, so she was a wee bit disappointed when we got there and none was to be found ("where's the easter bunny?"). i don't know how the idea of one was implanted - certainly not from us.

at the show, i think we did less than last year, for some reason. maybe because i'm preggers and don't have the same stamina/speed. we did get a look-in at the following though: woodchop (just one event regrettably), cat pavilion (bean got to pat/stroke an enormous, shaggy grey and white persian-ish cat), pony rides (bean went on 2 rides, and dh made up the names of the ponies for her as the handlers were obviously students on holiday jobs and didn't know the ponies' names), pig pavilion (there was a cute 3 little pigs pen with a straw house, a twig/wood house, and a brick house, but the piggies were asleep in a children's toy nylon tunnel instead), fashion pavilion, food pavilion (the bean was asleep in the stroller by that stage so dh and i could go do our own thing)...and finally, a ride on a carousel.

we didn't get to see the magnificent diving pigs (apparently the only ones in australia) - long queues were turned away at each performance time slot because of the act's popularity.

but we did get to watch part of an erth dinosaur petting zoo, where 'actors' had their arms stuck up the behinds of puppet dinosaurs or manipulated puppets on strings.

monday mooch day
the only day we didn't have a fabulous activity planned was easter monday. dh mowed the back lawn, trimmed a hibiscus bush, and we went to officeworks for stationery supplies and later to borders bookstore. yes, very exciting.

because it rained in the afternoon, the bean philosophically told us, "we can't have the easter hunt," which was an activity that had been promised her by dh.