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....