Radilaide Adelaide

I made it to Adelaide! After 3 days of exploring Sydney, a night of dancing in King's Cross, and hanging out with Jill and Ruben, I hopped on a plane to Adelaide. For an understanding of the location - basically compare Australia to the contiginous 48 states. Sydney would be where Myrtle Beach area is and Adelaide would be like Houston.
I landed around 1 PM on Saturday. We went to Tyler's place - which is amazing btw. It has 3 stories. You walk in on the main level (after taking the elevator up to floor 8) and there's a kitchen, dining room, living room, laundry room, 1/2 bath, and balcony. Then you can either go upstairs to the rooftop deck which is HUGE and his own private deck. Or you can go downstairs to where he has 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. One of the bedrooms is actually set up as an office right now though. So yeah - its a pretty nice place. It's also within only a few blocks of downtown so we spent the day wandering around the city - eating lunch and dinner at two restaurants that Tyler knew already. As a side note - I ordered an "entree" for dinner which at home means "main course". Here - entree is taken more at its literal meaning - probably something like "entrance" - and is more just a starter course.
Adelaide is a cool city of about 300,000 people. It has a main downtown area with a bunch of restaurants and bars and shops. It even has a Target. The main grocery store down here seems to be Woolworths. Isn't that a grocery store from like the olden times? Like Breakfast at Tiffany's style or It's a Wonderful Life or something like that??? Anyways - it also has a nice river with a cool riverwalk that should be fun to run on. It has a beach area too about 30 min away by train from downtown but I have yet to explore that. It is also filled with lots of churches and parks and is a pretty pretty city...
Right now its Sunday morning at about 8:30 am - I already talked to the fam a bit - and once Tyler wakes up - I think we're going to go have breakfast at this cool place in the hills outside of the city. Exciting!

At the top of the world!

Thanks so much for the comments, people! You're the best! It definitely helps me in the blog writing so I don't feel like I'm just rambling to myself. haha!

So Day 2 of Australia was pretty busy. I started out by hiking down to the Opera House from Jill and Ruben's place. Being up close to it is definitely pretty cool. It's huge! And actually split up in to like 3 different bldgs. The surface is a sort of tiling that's all shiny and sparkly. I went inside to try to get a tour but the cheapest tour was $35 and included one or two of the concert halls...they weren't able to tell me which. So yeah - I decided not to do that. I mean a concert hall is a concert hall, right? I did learn later in the day though that the guy who designed the exterior of the opera house (some dutch guy i think?) had cost Australia so much money that they were giving him a really hard time at the completion of the exterior. So much so that he decided to leave the country and never come back. he never even actually saw it done supposedly. the interior supposedly doesn't match the exterior at all and is really ugly. or so i hear.

Anyways - after that I wandered around the harbor a bit and ate lunch in The Rocks neighborhood at a little pub type place. I had nachos but they were a bit weird with a very creamy nearly white guac on top and only white cheese instead of mexican style. from there i hiked up to the Harbor Bridge - the big bridge that you see in all the pics of Sydney (don't worry - I'll post some pics when I get to Tyler's). i started to walk across and at the first tower - there are towers at both ends - you could go up to the top. it gave the history of the bridge and stuff like that. it was pretty interesting - completed around 1932 during the depression in Australia but it helped create jobs when Sydney was at 33% unemployment. Yay - pretty crazy high! After going to the top of this tower which had really cool views of the city and the bridge and the opera house - i continued to walk across the bridge. they actually also sell these "bridge climb" tours which are actually walking across the TOP of the bridge arch connected to a harness. It sounded pretty exciting but cost around $180 so I decided against it. Oh well.

From the bridge - I walked over to Darling Harbor. This had sort of a Navy Pier-ish type feeling - with restaurants and gardens and a ferris wheel and stuff like that. I hung out in a coffee shop there for awhile and then went over to meet Jill and Ruben at the Shangri-La Hotel which had a bar on the top - floor 36. It had AMAZING views of the city and we even got a seat right on the Opera House side so we got to see the lights of the Opera House changing all night. Remember - its nearly winter here so when I went to meet them around 5 - it was already starting to get dark. Good thing I have a full day of light - haha!

After our drinks there - we headed back to the apt and Jill made some delicious Thai food and we hung out and it was tons of fun!

So yeah - basically in my 2 days of exploring Sydney - I've pretty much decided that it feels just like any US city. It feels about the size of San Fran and has lots of different neighborhoods and stuff like that. There's definitely not any culture shock here - not like Japan - haha!

So I'm headed out to explore now - possibly down to Bondi Beach to do some exploring....

In the beginning...

Yay - I made in to Australia! I figured that if I'm ever going to blog - this is probably the time to do it. So yeah - here I am - blogging.

I got here on Wednesday morning (Syndey time) after a flight from San Fran with Tyler. Being a Qantas imporant person, he got us free upgraded to "premium economy" which we figured would basically be like an exit row in coach. Nope. It was actually more like first class on a domestic flight so that was pretty exciting. We got our own little tvs, champagne while we were still on the runway, socks, big comfy blankets, pillows 3/4 of the normal size of pillows as opposed to the normal 1/4 size flight pillows, and eye covers for while we're sleeping. Plus we had a good bit of room! It was pretty exciting!

So then we landed around 6 am on Wednesday (yesterday), found Jill and Ruben's apt, and then started our exploring of Sydney! We hiked the 2 miles down to Central Quey (pronounced KEY). Walking through downtown was pretty neat - but it really felt like just about any city - except they drive on the other side of the road. We took a 30 minute ferry over from Pier 3 to the city of Manly. It was a little beach surfing type town. Jill had recommended a brewery called 4 Pines that we went to for lunch and then we did a bit of hiking around some of their nature preserves along cliffs and stuff like that. It was really pretty!

BTW - while I'm writing this - the Good Morning America type show of Australia is on and their interviewing a guy from Seattle about Men's Secrets on Dating... Random....

Anyways - back to yesterday - after exploring Manly for a few hours and seeing several very LARGE spiders along our path in webs (eek!) - we took the ferry back to Sydney. It was starting to get a bit chilly too - probably around 60 degrees and rainy. We did the walk back to Jill and Ruben's apt - wandering through some botanical gardens along the way. Ruben then met us for dinner and we went out for Thai food and a drink. It really felt like it could be back home. From the surface - there's really no difference... yet... We ended the night by dropping Tyler off at the airport and hanging out until Jill landed and then hanging out some more....

Today - I'm just getting ready to head out for my next adventure - Opera House? The Rocks neighborhood? The big bridge???