First of all, I find it hilarious that everyone assumed that I actually saw the spider hiding under my toilet seat. But no, I didn’t. If you read my last post carefully, I just said that I learned that they like to hide there. So unfortunately no, I haven’t seen any deadly spiders as of yet, but when I do I’ll let you know!
Today, I did most of the tourist-type things that I wanted to do in Sydney. First I went to the Sydney Opera house and did a tour. The opera house is amazing! It was built so that it resembled a ship, as you can see by the picture below. It’s right on the edge of the water so the master architect thought it would be cute to have it look like sails from afar. One interesting thing about this building is that the master architect never saw his creation completed. They fired him when it was about 2/3 completed because he was taking too much money and too much time to complete it. After that, he left Australia and he never came back, not even when they asked him to. I would like to believe that he’s not really mad about it anymore, but now he won’t come down to Australia because he doesn’t think he’d survive the trip! (He’s 89 or so now).
They have all kinds of shows that play in the Opera House. They recently had the circus (!), they’ve had sumo wrestling, and of course they have operas and plays. Actually, the final show of “Australian Idol” is filmed in the Opera House, and it can fit thousands of screaming teenage girls! Another bit of trivia – the current governor of California actually won his LAST bodybuilding championship in this building. Of course, this was before he started acting or dabbling in politics. Can you tell that I didn’t want to look up how to spell his name?
You could also see the Sydney Harbor bridge from the Opera House, and for all of you who don’t believe I’m really here, check it out:
After that, I went around to the botanical gardens, which are near the government mansion. They were absolutely beautiful, and HUGE. Right at the entrance of the gardens, there was one area that had pieces of buildings flung about everywhere. It kind of looked like a building threw up all over the grass. There was no sign that explained exactly what these pieces of building were doing on the grass. I assume they knocked down a building and they just wanted those pieces to remember it by. Or something.
My final tourist-y thing for the day was the Sydney Aquarium. I haven’t been to an aquarium for a while, so I don’t know how different it is from one in the states, but it was definitely neat. I saw crocodiles, sharks, eels, jellyfish, seals, penguins, and all kinds of fish really. I’ll just post a couple of my favorite pictures.
Don’t feed the crocs: (sorry it’s sideways I can’t really edit my pics before uploading them… just turn your head or your computer screen)
I didn’t even realize the eel head was in the pipe when I took this, I was just taking a picture of it’s tail, the pipe was completely dark.
Cthulhu is in Sydney!
Oh, and the best part of the aquarium, I got to ride the shark! Don’t worry, I was never in any danger. The shark was heavily sedated.
After I left the aquarium, I *was* going to go to the wildlife park, but by then my feet were killing me. I walked pretty much across the whole city of Sydney because I was too cheap to buy a bus ticket. Well, I was also afraid of taking the bus because I had never taken a bus by myself and I thought I would most likely get lost and end up in the outback. So I figured the walking and exercise would be a good idea.
The wildlife park and holding a koala will just have to be tomorrow. But tomorrow it’s supposed to be 25 degrees. For real. Yo.
They just announced that tonight is ladies night at the hostel bar! I think I’m going to skip it. I am so beat from all the walking today, and it’s just the beginning of my trip so I don’t want to start spending all my money too early. Can I tell you that Sydney is SO expensive! It’s ridiculous that a box of bandaids is 7.95 AUD! And a small bottle of sunscreen was 9.95 AUD! They’ll bankrupt me!
Anyhow, I think I’ll start working part-time after surf camp (which starts next Monday) so at least I’ll be able to pay for my housing or something while I’m here, so I don’t spend too much.
I do have a lot of other good pictures, which I tried uploading to a Flickr account, but it was taking forever to upload them, and I pay for my access to the internet unless I walk far away to the work/travel building, so maybe I’ll upload them when I next go there. You can expect to see more detailed pics of all my travels at a later date.
OK, I need to go put my aching feet up and get ready for another long walking day tomorrow.
Hasta!