Just before a single case of Delta would spread and lock down the harbour city of Sydney, many of us managed to enjoy the Queen’s birthday long weekend during the first half of June. Eager to leave the house after being trapped indoors for a long time, I decided to visit the newly renovated Australian Museum and compare it to the fun interactive exhibits that I had experienced while I was in the United States of America – from the Natural History Museum in Houston, Texas to the Smithsonian in Washington D.C.

It didn’t help that my memories of visiting the Australian Museum were very lacklustre in nature. In particular, I remember paying to see an Egyptian exhibit and had finished taking a look around within an hour or two.The only good experiences I can recall during my childhood were the occasional special exhibits at the PowerHouse Museum and a trip to Questacon back when I was about 12.

 So, with my mother in tow, we paid a visit to the Australian Museum, located on the other side of Hyde Park and was a stone’s throw away from St Mary’s Cathedral. 

Being a long weekend, there was, unfortunately, a lot of children and their parents in attendance. The young scamps were almost everywhere. And none of them were wearing masks! I almost wanted to dropkick them out into the cold wintry air for spoiling my fun.

Don’t they know that museums are for twenty-something-year-olds? Can’t they appreciate that someone with a steady job wants to learn more about the natural history of the world? 

Honestly. There should be a sign outside museums that say that children under the age of 10 are not allowed inside!

(I jest. But given the fact that the pandemic has yet to go away fully, you can understand the paranoia that had been on my mind).

Though this was before the Delta case that would send us scrambling to our homes, my mother and I had decided to take several precautions. Ever conscious that it would only take one to start a cluster, I wore a mask during the entirety of our exploration and was hesitant to use the touch screens even though there was a significant amount of sanitiser.

For the first time in a long while, I was able to relive some of the magic I witnessed while I was in the United States of America as I took in the impressive display of taxidermy animals. While it would have been better if they had dressed up some of the glass cages, it was still a delight to see animals posed just so to demonstrate their noble carriage.

Explanations were also fun to read rather than laborious or being bogged down by technical jargon. It was also fun to see an exhibit dedicated to the exploration of various cultures in the Pacific as well rather than an entire hall dedicated to butterflies and beetles. 

But best of all, there was (almost) an entire floor dedicated to dinosaurs! And while I may not be a child under ten or a ‘too cool for school’ teenager, I was still taken aback by the replicas that were present. To my delight, they had even recreated a dinosaur only to have a group of scientists commit to a bit of completing an autopsy to determine what had killed the great beast.

If we could have stayed longer, I would have. 

Unfortunately by 2pm, my stomach was grumbling and the cafe at the top offered a meagre fare that I considered overpriced and would also take significantly longer than I would have liked to be prepared. I’m not going to pay $15 for a Ham and Cheese sandwich. That’s daylight robbery, that is! 

So, off my mother and I trotted down towards Wynyard and Barangaroo. Though the Crown Towers (renamed because they could not obtain a casino licence) had finished construction a good long while ago (for what even is time in lockdown), I hadn’t the chance to pay it a good visit and enjoy what was on offer. Given the late hour, most of the restaurants had closed already for lunch.

Thankfully, the Woodcut was still open and we sat down to enjoy a very late meal to fill up our stomachs and give us the energy boost we needed to head back home.

And so ended a perfectly good outing. 

Little did we know that Delta had already entered Australia and was possibly circling around the Harbour city.

And even when the case was announced on 16th June, Supanova (a great big nerdy convention) was still allowed to go ahead from 18th – 20th June. A little hesitant, I even asked my friend, Bleachpanda, if we ought to risk it. 

Not knowing that it would spiral into quadruple digits despite lockdown while in August, we decided to go ahead with our plans.

Had anyone with COVID-19 actually attended the convention, Supanova would have been the perfect superspreader event. Though numbers were lower than they had been in years previous, it was still a confined indoor event. 

It’s hard to say if my preparations would have helped, including masks, sanitiser and alcohol wipes.

Bleachpanda and I took a quick gander around at the stalls and within two hours, we had finished and were headed back to my car. I was laden down with a few items that I had bought from Tee Turtle shirts to a cute face mask. And then we enjoyed lunch at a Japanese restaurant in Lidcombe – which, at time of writing – is an impossible dream given how quickly things have changed and escalated over the intervening months.

And while vaccination numbers are rising, it still doesn’t feel as if infections have reached their peak though August is ending and September is on the horizon. Already there is talk of students returning to classrooms by October but it’s so hard to look at the future when everyday feels the same as the last (or perhaps progressively worse). Australia might not see the numbers that have utterly decimated India and Indonesia, but it’s terrifying to know that the disease could enter your home just from a trip to grab groceries.

Even with higher vaccination numbers, it still pays to maintain a lot of the measures that we’ve been practicising such as masks, social distancing and washing those hands, you dirty pig! (Oh gosh, Season 3 of Sex Education can’t come out fast enough!)