Sydney & Phillip Island

Sydney was really good! I got to the hostel around 11:30, put my stuff down & wandered around the city a little bit. Found a place to eat & then went back and took a nap until Gozi (my friend who is studying in Brisbane) got there at 4. Then we went & wandered around some more, had dinner, met a German guy who was sharing the room with us in the hostel and one of his friends who is Irish, and we hung out with them a little bit. Friday morning we got up early & walked around Sydney doing the touristy things. Saw some of the Darling Harbour, walked across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, saw the Sydney Opera House, which was SO cool to see. I was so excited to see it, which was surprising. We took a tour of the Opera House, which was beautiful inside. And then since we’re students & took the tour we got a HUGE discount on Sydney Symphony tickets and got to see the symphony in the Opera House later on that night, which was REALLY cool!!! I’d never seen a symphony before, and this one was doing “Crime Time” which was scores from movies like The 6th Sense, & The Matrix. The tour was really interesting. I didn’t realize the Opera House is so new. It was started in 1963 and wasn’t finished until the ‘70s, which I found shocking… for some reason it was placed in my mind in the category of things like the Eiffel tower & Big Ben, which is silly really because Australia was only found by the British in the late 1700s. But still, I guess I thought the Opera House had been around for at least a hundred years or so. We also saw some museums and stuff on Friday. Saturday was the tour of the Blue Mountains. We got to see the Three Sisters rock formation and other really cool nature stuff. I’ll put some pictures up. Sunday Gozi left after breakfast and I walked around the Darling Harbour. Went to Paddy’s Market- a huge flea market where I got a backpacker’s backpack for only $20. Also went to the Chinese Garden of Friendship which was beautiful.

This past weekend 2 of my friends and I went home with an Australian friend to stay with his family for the weekend. We were supposed to camp but the weather wasn’t nice so we just hung out and went to his friend’s house. It was so nice being in a home, and his family was so friendly and welcoming. We also went to Phillip Island which has amazing views and we watched the Penguin Parade, which is when the penguins come in out of the sea and find their little nests in the hill for the night. They’re so cute!!! They’re Little Penguins, so they’re not like the ones we normally think of, and they come in to the shore in little groups and get scared and swim back and forth until there’s enough of them to run out into the grass. It was a really good weekend.

This Thursday I leave for my One Fish Two Fish trip. 9 days of crazy rafting, bungee jumping, snorkeling/scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef, up from Brisbane to Cairns. Can’t wait to be in the sun!!!

I’m thinking about changing my flight coming home from November 16th to sometime mid December. If I do I’ll be able to go to New Zealand for 2 weeks and then some other stuff that I wouldn’t have time to do otherwise. I have to figure out the flight change prices & some little things though. We’ll see!