Crikey mate!

After a lazy morning with all the family out on their various tasks and Prince excited to still have playmates, Julia and I had to lock up the bungalow and make a quick dash out the door to adventure unfortunately sans schnauzer. Here's Julia in front of their house:

More cute houses in the neighborhood.

With a couple minutes walk and a couple left turns we arrived at the bus stop for line 207 to take us from the northern suburbs across the Harbor Bridge to downtown Sydney.

We basically figured out the whole bus deal with minor confusion, and our bus was a few minutes late as Julia noted Australians notoriously are. She unfortunately did not have the small bills to purchase her ticket right there, but the bus driver was sweet to let us on with buying one ticket for the two of us.

From our half hour bus ride into the city a few of my observations include:
- Instead of "no passing," signs say "No overtaking on bridge" - British lingo!
- Perhaps I'm just used to "Minnesota nice," but strangers generally don't just smile. People are extremely nice when you actually talk with them, but random people usually are paid no mind.
- Buses are quite modern, efficient, and well-kept, a testament to Australia's solid public transport and infrastructure.
- The city is populous, but it is much more green and much less crowded than expected. Sidewalks are never jam-packed like you would see in businessy New York, and joggers have ample space to weave around other pedestrians without much hassle.

We definitely did plenty of walking today as well! Julia and I set on our adventure with basically a checklist of things to get in today with free reign to wander and explore whatever seems interesting on our way to our target destinations. We crossed a few paths more than once, ended up going towards the harbor when we intended to go the opposite direction, but we got some decent bearings eventually and accomplished our agenda with more fun in the process!

Other photos in and around the city:

We made it to our first intentional stop after some fun exploring: the Sydney Tower. Once we got ourselves to the general area, it was not too difficult to spot above the rest of the skyscrapers and make our way towards it. Seems like everything this week will cost us a pretty penny, what with the oh-so-wonderful perpetual economic mess of the US, strong Australian dollar, etc., but we found a good deal where we could get a discount ticket package for the Tower, Wildlife World, and the Aquarium - the three stops we happened to be planning on for today!

The Centrepoint Tower, one of the world's top ten tallest buildings and the second tallest observation tower in the southern half of the globe, was what we wanted to start our day off with. Getting ourselves a good view of the city could only come from as bird's-eye as we could make it.

Back to ground level for Julia to introduce me to some foods including Tim Tams, a wonderfully simple cookie, really 2 small, rectangular cookies sandwiching chocolate and covered in chocolate. The dark chocolate version was our treat today. And a couple of these followed my lunch of pie! No, not dessert pie like we'd assume. If you go to a pie shop, many are meat pies that you pick up and eat with your hands. So mine was basically beef stew wrapped in perhaps a thick croissant-like crust. Trying more Aussie foods, check.










Next on our list was to make our way to Darling Harbour (another sweet name, pun intended), which soon became one of our favorite areas. Right on the wharf were adjacent pinpoints for us, with Wildlife World coming first. Rather than going to one of the other zoo options Sydney has to offer, we chose to just do Wildlife World because it houses only Australia's unique creatures, rather than showing off a mix of worldly wildlife. And it only took us about an hour to spend time with the crocs, skinks, echidnae, kangaroos, koalas, wallabies, and wombats (among others, including all the intense spiders that my momma had been reading and warning me about...).

And take silly pictures!

The crocodile was sunbathing on the other side of the tank when we got there, but it seemed as soon as it had an audience, it came right up and modeled for us!

Thank goodness for thick glass. It's times like these we miss the Crocodile Hunter...

Now for the fuzzier and more iconic creatures:

My new favorite animal! In my opinion, the wombat is the most underrated of all the cute and cuddly-looking Aussies. It reminds me of a giant guinea pig and just kind of snuffles around in the dirt. Wombats are marsupials like kangaroos and koalas, and apparently their behinds are their best weapon against attackers too! What cool little guys.

(This one is plastic...)

But who can forget kookaburras and koalas?

Just woke up from its nap for a snack.

Now on to the Aquarium to visit the things that lurk in the water that can also seriously injure/maim/kill you if you're not smart about it... Like this huge fish.

Well, this coral cannot kill you (that I know of), but I'm sure other things in the Great Barrier Reef can! Next time I visit this continent, that's a place I definitely have to get to.

These jellies could do some damage though.

Find the seahorse! Sea dragon, pardon me. Hint: it's the thing that looks like a weed! Also known as a weedy sea dragon. What I wouldn't give to discover and name a species...

Apologies for the lack of clarity of this shot but it is the best I could do in the 360 degree aquarium tunnel to snap a profile of the dugong, or what most of us would know as a manatee. Such a graceful creature that happens to be known also as the nickname "sea cow."

Here's another, more lethal, graceful beauty: the stingray.

Perhaps not up close though! Julia remarked, "He has a huge nose like the kind we'd be embarrassed about!"

More crazy inhabitants of Aussie waters, like this turtle that is actually intentionally stuck! They wedge themselves in between rocks so they can nap without getting swept away by the strong currents.

So after platypuses, eels, and octopi (oh my!), poking sea urchins, and taking advantage of all the ways the Sydney Aquarium made their really cool creatures accessible to its visitors, Julia and I took a short rest by the huge wall of fish, this great window into the tank before our final stop on our day trip.

We had a little time to kill before our only scheduled event of the day, but after going through the souvenirs we had collected during the day's work, it was time to check in for the Sydney Showboat! It was a bit pricey, but we decided to splurge a little on this showboat dinner cruise around the harbor to see the lights of Sydney at night and have a little fun.

While magic and showgirls are not our typical choice of entertainment, the experience was great. A swanky three course meal was included in our ticket and we celebrated a successful day of sightseeing with a glass of wine. My task was to introduce Julia to a wine I thought she'd enjoy, Moscato, a sweet dessert wine that my Singaporean friend Deborah gave me to try when I visited her, while tonight I tasted a Shiraz Cabernet - it's fun exploring wine now that we're 21!

After our main course, we ran out on the deck to get a few shots of the night harbor scene.

The other fun part of the evening was that we hadn't gotten a wonderful picture of the two of us since we were young, but there was a photographer running around taking portraits of all the guests. We were hoping they would be complimentary with our ticket too, but unfortunately that was not the case. As much as we loved the photo when he presented it to us, it was not a love worth $15 per. But the sweet thing is that when we were going to give the photos back, the couple dining next to us had overheard our deliberations and paid for one for each of us! Random acts of kindness.

Julia and I ended our night by popping into a pub by the wharf to just hang out and play some pool (despite the fact that our pool skills are quite lacking), where we ended up being challenged to a game by a couple of tipsy boys who were amusing in that haven't-graduated-high school kind of way (drinking age in Australia is 18). Apparently being American women makes us charming, charming enough that we beat them as awful as we are and have an entertaining story to tell.

Goodnight all!