Halfway around the world... again...
So I finally got my pictures (a link to the photos) uploaded and thought I should share them... I also figured this would be a good time to complete the updates from Australia now that I have photographs to assist in telling the story... or something like that.
Sydney was fun- Andy and I took tons of pictures of and around Sydney Harbor- highlighting the Opera House and the Harbor Bridge. We visited Taronga Zoo, Featherdale Wildlife Park, and Oceanworld and the Sydney Aquarium, so we got to see quite a bit of the indigenous fauna of Australia (among other animals). We were able to interact with kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, emus, etc. and saw a number of more unusual animals like albino peacocks and albino kangaroos. There's quite a variety of birds around the country and it was weeks before I heard one that actually chirped rather than squawked. We visited the Blue Mountains and wandered through a bit of the (temperate) rainforest- a bit different as it's made up of euclypts and turpentine mostly. We made our way out to Manly Beach for a day despite the weather being a bit too cool for swimming, and went on an... interesting nighttime "ghost tour" of the Sydney Quarantine Station.
We saw quite a few movies while there as the Sydney Film Festival was in progress, but the most interesting movie experience was at Govinda's Movie Room and Vegetarian Buffet. After entering and passing by the pamphlets on enlightenment and similar topics, you walk up a number of stairways to the restaurant where you buy tickets and then up a bit more you find yourself in a dimly lit, deep red room with rows of cushions lined up on the floor. Complete with ambient music and incense, you're asked to take your shoes off before lying down to watch the movie. It was quite an evening.
The day before we left (in true dad fashion), we ended up running into a girl we went to high school with- just walking down the street in Kings Cross. Shortly thereafter, we went to an Aussie Rules football game which I was quite confused about as it's part of the "footy" category which typically refers to rugby (they're weird like us and don't call soccer 'football'), it's played at the Sydney Cricket Grounds, but it's actually a variation of Gaelic Football or something like that... After the game was over I still didn't have any better understanding.
When Andy headed off to the airport I went to Bondi Beach to check it out- again, too cold to do much without a wetsuit, but it was fun to take pictures. I decided I need to learn to actually talk to the cute Japanese surfers- especially the one who might've actually said something to me in Japanese.