Sydney

Well, as you can tell, I haven't been able to update my blog very regularly. This is because I am either working all the time, or taking trips that require more blogging, so there is hardly ever any time to spend updating. I will try to be better though. =). About a month ago, Sarah and I flew down to Sydney for 4 days. It was way fun. The city is beautiful, set on a harbour, with tons of stuff to do. As soon as we got to the hotel and settled in, we ventured into the city. Our first stop was Darling Harbour and the Sydney Aquarium.



We ended up spending a lot of time at the harbour, between shopping, eating and of course taking pics. One of the coolest things we saw was an art exhibit called "Earth from Above", in which a photographer has traveled around the world taking hundreds of pictures, and there were a hundred or so on display in Sydney. They were some amazing photos, and then under each one there was a statistic. Here are just a few...

"There are enough resources on planet Earth for 12 million people, currently there are 6 million people, yet 180 million go hungry."

"If everyone lived like Australians (it would be worse if it were about Americans, I am sure), there would need to be 5.3 Earth's to meet everyone's needs."

It was eye opening to read some of that stuff and it made me think about how wasteful we can be with what we have.



We soon headed to the Tower for 360 degree pre and post sunset views of the city.







The next day we headed over to Bondi Beach, but since there was so much stuff to fit in just a few short days, we didn't spend much time there, although it was beautiful. We did do the walk from Bondi to Bronte Beach though, which had amazing views.






After a short bus ride to Watson's bay, we had to quickly catch the last ferry back to Circular Quay. The views from the ferry were amazing...we got up close to the Sydney Harbour Bridge as we passed by the Opera House. Both were as amazing in person as I had imagined.







On our third day we visited the site of the 2000 Olympic games, which was a ways out of the city. It was neat to see where the games were held...I would have loved to have gone. Just maybe I will be heading to Beijing for the 2008 games. =) Again, we didn't get to spend as much time there as we would have liked, because we had get back to the city for our climb of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.





This was one of the most amazing things I have ever done! As if it wasn't already expensive, we paid a bit more to do a "twilight climb", which meant we started when it was still light, got onto the arch in time to see the sun set, and then by the time we got to the very top, it was completely dark, and we got to see the city lit up and the hustle-bustle of rush hour traffic right below us. We saw amazing views of the city during each of these times, and it was well worth the extra money. It was very high up at the top, but it never felt unsafe. They go to extreme measures for safety, including a special stylish one piece jumpsuit with a heavy duty belt that links on to the actual bridge from the very beginning. I was sad we weren't able to take our own cameras on the climb, but we did get some "professional" pics taken.




Our last day we took a 3 hour train ride to the Blue Mountains. We did a quick hike to see Three Sisters and also spent some time at Scenic World. Again we were on a time crunch as we had to head back to Sydney on the train in time to catch our flight back to Brisbane that night.






We used public transportation quite a bit in Sydney, including mostly trains. These are some pics of us having fun in the train station. (Note Sarah's Sydney bought OWL shoes).