Day 15: Foster's: Australian for Beer. Not.

Greetings everyone! Thought I'd start off this post with an interesting fact about Foster's "Australian" Lager. According to adviceaboutbeer.com, experts say "While international marketing of the beer often focuses on its Australian connections, Foster's does not enjoy widespread popularity in Australia." Australians typically prefer other lagers produced by the Foster's Group such as Carlton's Crown Lager and Stella Artois. So the Foster's Group focuses on the stereotypical Crocodile Dundee marketing techniques for the Americas and the UK because it apparently sells, but it isn't even a preferred beer in its country of origin. More proof that we are a media-driven, fickle society. Ha. That's enough of that, let's get back to the fun stuff.

False Advertising?

Today was a tourist-filled day that turned out to be so much more fun than I expected. We set out on a series of different buses on course to the world famous Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary. All I knew is that if you went you could get your picture taken holding a koala, and when are you ever going to be able to say you've done that again, so bucket list in hand, I stepped into the park. There were koalas everywhere! According to the Guinness Book of World Records, it is the world's first and largest koala sanctuary. It was like a zoo except for the fact that every koala habitat wasn't contained by a cage, so these animals were a couple feet which was pretty cool. But let's back up, whoever started the trend of drawing koalas as these super cute little marsupial mammals, was exaggerating quite a bit. Yeah, they're cute in the fluffy and small way, but if you get a good look at their faces in person they definitely aren't puppy or baby panda cute.

Cute-ish

Not even fair

We walked around for a bit, we finally found the koala holding/photo shoot area and I decided to get a picture. After once again staring hard at my bucket list, I coughed up $16 for the professional photograph that had to be purchased in order for you to be able to use your own camera to take pictures of the koala and yourself. It was pretty awesome holding the koala, even though he was a lot heavier than I imagined. And my health remained intact, regardless of the speculations I expressed from my last post. Take a look at Fin the Koala and myself.

Fin and I. They told us to pooch out our stomachs in order for the koala to have something to sit on. Mom, I promise I've been eating healthy and I haven't acquired that belly since I've been here.

After the koala photo shoot, we were encouraged to go buy a $2 bag of what looked like rabbit food and go and feed the kangaroos. I guessed we would head into a caged area and feed the kangaroos through the fence with a zoo keeper standing right next to us making sure everything went smoothly. Turns out when we walked into the Kangaroo Preserve, it was just a giant field of kangaroos, emus, and us. It was awesome. We were told to approach the kangaroos slowly, keep low, hold our hands out flat, and the kangaroos should come up to us and eat the food right out of our hand. It was awesome. There were so many of them and they were so tame! We could pet the kangaroos, feed the babies, and be around them while feeling completely comfortable, it was one of the cooler things I have done on this trip so far. Got a fun video of trying to get a cockatoo to talk with some guys. Well I'll check in tomorrow. War Eagle!

Feeding a wallaby

Getting ignored by a kangaroo

 The stupid bird started talking as soon as I turned off my camera. Still a funny process though.