Sydney

Sydney Harbor

Thursday morning we woke up and enjoyed a nice breakfast of Weetabix and tea. Being back in Australia has reminded me how much I love tea. Morning and afternoon tea are some of the most wonderful and relaxing parts of the day. I don't understand why the U.S. hasn't quite caught on to it. We were supposed to catch the bus at noon, so Liz and I spent most of the morning packing. I spent some time looking through some albums Gram handed me. There were tons of pictures of Josh, Coba and I as babies and my mom and dad when they were my age. Its hard to believe they had three kids when they were 23.

Opera House Up Close

After morning tea, Gram packed Liz and I lunches to take on our journey up to Sydney. She took us on a walk so we could stretch our legs before the bus ride and than we headed to the bus station. We easily hopped on our bus to Sydney and about 4 hours later we hopped off the bus right next to our hostel (Sydney Central YHA). I was just waiting  to see how Liz would react to staying in a hostel. Liz had never been in one before. I think she was a little nervous. It wasn't at all bad though, we were the first ones to the room, everything was clean and the hostel was in a pretty good location. We locked our stuff up and then headed out to walk around a little and get our bearings. The weather wasn't fabulous in Sydney, it was raining a little and the temp was in the 60s. After going to the 3 Wise Monkeys Pub and having a pizza and a Strongbow (and enjoying some wifi) we headed back to the hostel and signed up for a pub crawl.

The pub crawl was pretty awesome although we had some doubts about it at first, but we ended up meeting a bunch of cool people. While we've been traveling we've met tons of Germans, British and Canadians. A lot of the people we met in Sydney had just graduated from college (Uni) and were trying to find work and jobs anywhere they could so they could live in Australia. Most didn't have a really specific plan, they just bought a plane ticket and a return ticket for a year later, and were living day by day. I wish I were that spontaneous!
The next morning Liz and I had breakfast and some internet time before heading to see the sites in Sydney.  We took an hour long walk exploring Sydney down to the Ferry Quay where we walked to the Opera house and got some great pics of the Sydney Harbor Bridge. We oogled at some beautiful Australian Opal necklaces, and upon realizing they were out of our budget...took some more awesome pics and just sat for a while to enjoy the view.
We went to a little cafe by the harbor and had our Strongbows and lunch and then had a leisurely walk around town. I needed to find a pair of "thongs" for our time at the beach. Liz and I are still getting used to hearing flip flops called thongs. Asking for them in a store was just a little embarrassing! We ate dinner at a sushi restaurant because we were craving sushi since we arrived in China but were too scared to try it. We are loving the "no worries" attitude Aussies have. No one we've come across is very high strung, everyone is just happy and relaxed all the time.
After dinner we went to hang out with some of the people we met the night before. Backpackers are awesome to be around, and everyone has interesting stories. We ended up going out with them to this "exclusive club" that we could get into for free because one of the backpackers worked for the company doing promo. I don't usually like to talk about and say nasty things, but the guy with the hook up was one of the most unpleasant people I've ever met in my entire life. Ask me later if you want the full scoop!