We started out trip nice and early Wednesday morning. We were picked up by a shuttle at 3:30 AM outside of our apartment and we headed off to the airport. When we were checking in, the woman asked for our passports and then told us that we needed visas to travel to Australia (which we did not have)! For a split second, we didn't know what to do, but then she said that we could just go and get electronic visas at another counter. Whew! After getting our visas, we had to go to another counter to pay a $25 departure tax, which is required of everyone leaving New Zealand. The flight to Sydney took about 3 hours and when we were coming in to land, we had a beautiful view of the city!
After going through customs and gathering our luggage, we found our way to a shuttle that would take us to our hostel. We stayed at "The Pink House," which was QUITE interesting, let me say! Very skeevy place, not clean and just a strange group of people staying there. Luckily, we were only there for 2 nights, so we decided to stick it out, especially since we paid for a 4-share dorm and received a twin room instead. Thank God Kelly and I had our own room, or we probably would have been so freaked out by the place that we would have left. Anyway, after "settling in" as best as possible under the circumstances, we headed out to explore Sydney! We did SO much walking that day. We walked all along the water, through a park called the Domain, and then through the Royal Botanical Gardens.
We were getting really hungry, so we ducked out of the gardens for a bit to grab some lunch (DELICIOUS chicken, avocado, tomato and cheese sandwiches). On our walk back towards the gardens, we stopped to check out the Art Gallery NSW (New South Wales), which had some very interesting exhibits - a lot of contemporary style art. 
When we finally got back to the gardens, we were walking through a shaded area because it was so warm out. We were hearing some weird, bird-sounding noises, and Kelly looked up in the trees to see what it was. It turned out that there were literally HUNDREDS of bats in the trees. Kelly got really freaked out and we tried to get out of that area as fast as possible. It was pretty funny! 
We continued our walk along the water and wound up right at the Sydney Opera House! There was also a beautiful view of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the background. We took TONS of pictures. It was just so amazing to actually SEE these places. I mean, the Sydney Opera House is one of those things that I've seen in pictures a million time, and now here I was, standing right in front of it. 
As we made our way to the harbor area, we tried to find an internet cafe, so we went inside of the Marriot to ask directions. What a change from the Pink House!! We then bought postcards and went to a cafe for some flat whites (delicious...basically a shot of espresso in steamed milk....pretty much the staple coffee in NZ and Australia). So we were sitting at these outdoor tables, just relaxing and resting our feet while writing out some postcards. But we noticed that around us, they were putting all of the other tables and chairs away, so that it was just us. They said that they were closing, so we felt rushed and just packed our stuff up and left. As we were walking away, the waitress comes running up to us....we had totally forgotten to pay! It was very embarrassing, but I think they could tell from our reaction that it was a complete mistake. 
We stopped into another art museum on our way to the old part of town, which is called "The Rocks." We just strolled around the area, stopping into shops, etc. We went to an Italian restaurant for dinner. We had pasta, but the portions were really small and we were still hungry. After dinner, we walked back to the harbor to wait for the bus to bring us back near out hostel. We waited at the bus stop for an hour and a half for bus #311 to come. Tons of other buses were coming by, but not the one we needed of course. We confirmed with 3 different bus drivers that we were in the right place (which we were) but they just said that there was a traffic accident and that they were running behind schedule. Finally, it was getting too late, so we just took a cab back to our neighborhood. We went into a hostel that was not ours, just to use their internet! Since we were still hungry, we decided to have a second dinner. (After all that waiting at the bus stop, we deserved it!) While we were looking for a place to eat, we had the strangest experience: We were standing outside of a restaurant, reading the menu, which happened to be right next to the table where an older couple was sitting. The woman looked up at us and told us that the lamb was fabulous. She then asked us if we wanted to try it and before we even had a chance to respond, she was shoving her fork in my face, and then Kelly's. Not only did we eat lamb off some random woman's fork, but she fed it too us! THEN...she and her husband proceeded to talk to us for another 20 minutes and insisted that we sit down at their table with them. They were very nice and friendly, it was just kind of an unusual situation! After they left, we had our own dinner...we shared fajitas and they were very yummy!! Back at the hostel, we showered in the disgusting bathroom and then went to sleep, exhausted after an amazing day!
No comments:
Post a Comment