2 Crazy Sheilas

Guess what??? I spent the weekend in Sydney!!!!

So if any of you had read my previous post I’m sure you know by now that I spent my weekend in Sydney.  I can’t even to begin to explain the fun that I had and my love for the city.  Apart from it being my first time in New South Wales, and Sydney at that, it was also my first time staying in a hostel.  When I thought of staying in a hostel I thought of the horror movie, Hostel, when a few students go to stay in one and dont come out.  I’m glad to say that I did come out alive, with good regards to the place I stayed and even better of the people I met while staying there.  There were people staying there from all over the world, but mostly Europe. I can’t wait to meet other cool travelers on my other stays in future travels!

Okay so I guess you all want to know what I did on my weekend, well you asked for it….brace yourselves this might get long!

Friday morning (approximately 4 a.m.) the five of us got into the taxi to make it to the airport in time for our 6 a.m. flight to Sydney.  With tired eyes and messy hair we arrived at 7:30 a.m. and headed straight to the Harbour City Backpackers Hostel to drop off our backpacks and head out to the city and see some sights.  We all decided right away that we wanted to go straight to the city center (a.k.a. The Rocks district) and see the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge.  To get to the harbour we walked through the Botanical Gardens in the middle of the city.  I couldn’t believe the beauty of the gardens, all the exotic plants and animals, especially the fruit bats, which are also called flying foxes. There were literally thousands of them in the trees hanging upside down, flying around and making noises.  Let me tell you I have never seen a bat any bigger in my life, they were like small airplanes (okay I may be exaggerating a little bit), but I did feel like I was on the set of Jurassic Park! It was amazing to see bats that size and in that number.  I read a little later that day how they were actually more of a pest animal because there are so many living in the gardens, and that they are ruining the plant life in the garden, but garden officials can’t seem to get rid of them.  I guess they keep coming back because of the safe habitat and abundance of food.  Well I’ll tell you it was an amazing site!  I also got to see a lot of cool plants and some of the biggest spiders in my life in the garden (some things I saw I liked more than others, eh hem, the spiders were not my favorite)!  Other than that it was an amazing garden and I was very impressed with it.

After the garden we headed to the Opera House.  I was ecstatic when I first saw the Opera House.  I was such a wierd feeling to be seeing something that I have seen to many times in pictures and on TV shows, but to be looking at it in person was awesome! After about a thousand pictures from every angle we decided to take a tour of the building, which I was skepitcal about at first, but so glad I did it in the end.  I learned to much about the building that I didn’t know before, like that the building was designed by a Danish man named Jorn Utzon in 1960, in which his winning design was part of a contest.  I also learned that his design of the Opera House broke many of the contests rules and that it was a late entry, so it was thrown out.  But because of a guest celebrity judge who insisted on looking at the thrown out designs (due to his lateness to the judging of the some 200 designs) he picked Utzons design as the winning one.  Utzons design was really cool because it mirrored a lot of the shipping industry that surrounded it in the harbour, such as the peaks of the Opera House, if you look at it from the inside it looks like the hull of a ship, and the front windows which are representative of a captains room in a ship.  Wow I sound like a boring history freak huh, sorry, I just thought it was cool!  All in all it was an awesome tour and I can’t wait to go back to Sydney before my departure back to the States and go to a show there. 

After the Opera House tour we decided to go on a cruise around the harbour, which was perfect timing because we got to see all of the Sydney skyline, the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge at sunset!  It was a nice day, but it wasn’t over! We then went and had a few drinks before going to the Sydney Sky Tower to see the whole city from 80-90 some stories at night.  We got some really cool views and pictures of the city we had just looked at from the harbour.  After that it was getting pretty late and being that we had been awake since 4 a.m. and had to be awake and ready to go to the Blue Mountains the next day at 8 a.m. we decided to head back to the hostel and call it a night!

8 a.m. came pretty quick and before I knew it I was jumping on a bus and heading east to the Blue Mountains.  The name is due to the blue color of them, which is due to the vapor given off by all of the Eucalyptus trees.  I was impressed to see that they were actualy quite blue! On our way to the mountains we stopped at the Sydney Olympic Park, where the Olympics were help in 2000 (I think).  It was cool to see a place where such big games took place at and see the grandeur of it all.  After our quick stop it was straight to the Blue Mountains.  No offense to Aussies but their mountains are a little more like our foothills or bluffs if you ask me, but hey this is coming from a girl who goes to the rockies every year!  The touristy part of the Blue Mountains are a rock formation called The Three Sisters.  It was pretty cool because the name was given after an old Aboriginal Legend.  It was said that there was a man who was an Aboriginal wizard with three daughters who lived in the mountains, and there was a beast called a bunyip that lived at the bottom.  So every time the father left his daughters he hid them behind a rock wall and told them not to leave.  One day his daughters were messing around and a rock slipped and fell to the bottom of the mountain which woke up the bunyip and came after the girls.  The father heard the rock slip and ran to find the bunyip cornering his three daughters so he used his magic stick to turn his daughters into rocks, for the meantime, to save them.  At this point the bunyip went after the father where he turned himself into a bird, flew away into a cave and waited there until the bunyip went back to sleep.  When he came out he realized that he had lost his magic stick and couldn’t turn himself or his daughters back.  It is said that there is a lyrebird (the fathers bird of choice) still at the bottom looking and pecking at the ground looking for his magic stick to this day!  It was pretty cool because we did see a lyrebird at the bottom of the mountain!!

After seeing the Three Sisters we went on a hike to see a really cool waterfall and took the trail of a few famous explorers, including Charles Darwin!  The waterfall was probably the biggest I have ever seen and I was very impressed with it and the trail! After getting back to the bus we headed back to Sydney, with a kangaroo site stop.  When we got back we decided to go out on the town! We went out at Darlight Harbour to a few bars with some of our hostel roomates and had a really good (and late) night!

After recovering from our night on the town, by sleeping in, we headed to the Harbour Brigde Pylon lookout.  The Pylon lookout is at the top of one of the brick columns of the bridge.  From the top we got an aerial view of the whole harbour, including the Opera House, famous Luna amusement park, and the city center.  It was pretty cool because we learned a little of the history of the bridge and got some really great views as well.  After that it was off to lunch at a rooftop bar and then some mingling and meandering through the city to the ferry.  We took the ferry over to Darling Harbour to go to the Sydney Aquarium.  The aquarium was a pretty cool place, with lots of Great Barrier Reef fish (wish has me exicted to go in a month or two) and from Antarctica and other places in the southern hemisphere.  We went to the aquarium later in the day on a Sunday night so we were almost the only ones there which was really nice! I think we hung out in the shark pool tunnels for about 45 minutes!  Seeing so many fish got us all thinking of fish for dinner so we headed to a resturant along Darling Harbour and had a good last meal in Sydney.  We then headed back to out hostel to pack up and get a good four hours of sleep before the taxi arrived at 4:30 a.m. to get us on our 6 a.m. flight back to Melbourne!  We got back to Melbourne reluctantly (classes were not the first thing I wanted to do when I got back from a weekend of little sleep and lots os activities) and back to the real world. 

Although at the end of my weeked I was as grumpy as can be due to little sleep and the weighing thought of classes all day I can still say that it was a great, amazing, awesome weekend and I wouldn’t change a thing! One thing that I am happy about is that I will be going back to Sydney in a matter of months to do the things I didn’t have time to on my short weekend! It is said that people of Sydney and Melbourne have a rivalry as to which city is better and I can honestly say that I love both cities and if I could be in two places at once…well you get it

Anyway its the big birthday week for Chisholm residents, I think theres about 7 birthdays this week, so we’re heading into the city for taco’s and half price cocktails to celebrate! I’m going to take advantage of tonight because after that I have to get into my school work, as I only have three more weeks of class left then its on to New Zealand and all around Aussie!

If your eyes hurt because you’ve been staring at the computer screen for a lengthy time now you can’t say I didn’t warn you! I will write again when I do more fun things! Until then hope all is well!!

~Claire

P.S. Will put up pictures of all of my adventures when I figure out how!