Sydney, Part 1

My sixth continent! Woot! Methinks I can skip Antarctica though.

So, the city of sails! We met up with Julia, the cousin of a friend, our first night here. She directed us to a groovy little wine bar, Love Tilly Devine, we never would have found on our own- and we loved it! It had a really cool atmosphere, it wasn’t touristy and there was great wine and great company. Thanks Julia! (And thanks Mark for the introduction!)

Next day we headed to the aquarium in the morning, which was so awesome. We saw jellies (yay!) and cool fish, but the shark tank was the best. You can walk under the water so that they swim over you for a better view of their teeth. Pretty cool and terrifying. There’s also a huge lego display there right now- love legos! And they have this (kind of hilarious) exhibit called The Future Is Wild, which speculates on where evolution is going from here. They put the creatures that aren't really a great leap up front and don't really tell you what the exhibit is, so you at first you're kind of like "what the heck is that? and is it here???" Then it gets crazier and crazier and you soon realize that this is simply someone's wild imagination given the CGI treatment. Apparently there are going to be such animals as the sharkopath, which is a glow-in-the-dark shark; the megasquid, which lives on land; and the (actual) flying fish, which has three mouths that come out of each other like the alien in aliens.

That afternoon we went on a free walking tour of Sydney, led by a girl at University who started doing them just because she loves her city so much. Which was apparent during the tour- she was awesome! We had such a fun time! We checked out some cool historic buildings and sites, and stopped at some places that she just had some funny stories about (including a little patch of grass where it’s still legal to graze sheep). She also gave us great history of the city and Australia in general. We’d highly recommend this tour to anyone heading to Sydney.

Scene from the Matrix!

Later that night it was gay Mardi Gras! There’s a HUGE parade and a big party afterwards. The parade was a lot like the Pride parade in Chicago. Great floats, even better outfits. Apparently Lilly Tomlin was the parade marshall and Rhianna was in the parade? Somehow we managed to miss both. We met up with Danni and Tim (from Queenstown) and some of their friends to watch the parade together and had a great time.

(Side note: Australia has GIANT bats that are not nocturnal. It’s a little freaky seeing them fly around all the time.)

(Second side note: the Aussie's like to nickname EVERYTHING. e.g. Maca's for McDonalds, brekky for breakfast, doco for documentary, etc. I love it.)

Next day, we took a tour out to the Blue Mountains. First stop was an aborigine center where we learned to throw boomerangs and the dude drew on my face. Also, apparently Kate Plus Eight filmed here and the kids were all running around crazy and they made the center build this hut to make it look like they were in the middle of nowhere, even though they were in a Sydney suburb.

Kate Plus Eight hut

After that, we drove around to different lookout points in the mountains. It was misty and rainy in the morning, which made viewing hard, but it cleared up later in the afternoon. The Blue Mountains are so called because they're covered in eucalyptus forests (which smell amazing!)- they eucalyptus leaves secrete an oil and when the sun reflects on that oil, it creates this kind of misty-blue haze:

Unfortunately, that tour kind of sucked. We were on it with two old people who couldn't do any hiking, so we were stuck driving everywhere- boooooooo. Definitely making note of that on trip advisor. The old people were also a bit racist, which also sucked, so JR and I were not sad for that trip to end. But the mountains were pretty! And then we stopped at a park with wild kangaroos!