Spring break plans and Sydney Part II
Trip Start
Jan 17, 2006
1
19
59
Trip End
Jul 14, 2006
Sydney, Australia
Monday, March 13, 2006
Aurelia
.However, I'm out of money on my prepaid account, and I wanted to switch to Vodaphone, and now I'm waiting for my Vodaphone SIM card to assume the Virgin mobile's number before I can call anyone else. That should be tomorrow at the latest (please oh please!).
This weekend was Catherine's engagement party back down in Sydney. Everyone except Shraddha went. Friday morning we were still trying to sort out a gift, and Lia and I picked up some cheese and crackers. The cheese told us what kind of wine to buy with it, and we got an extra bottle of champagne for Catherine and Allan. Then to pack. Everything fit in my Ireland bag, including my pillow, so that was goooood! We chilled at 22 Heaton until everyone got ready, then we took all our stuff and waited at the bus stop for quite a while until 226 came by. Once we arrived at the train station, we had another while to wait until the train came through, and then we were on our way! Lia read and I took a snooze, but the others tried to plan out what we wanted to do over the weekend. The trip took about two hours, and then we had to catch a bus, and hope that I would recognize the area. However, the bus driver was nice, and let us off right across from the road we needed. The walk was pretty brief, and when we arrived, Ross was out mowing the lawn. Judith immediately ordered us Aussie burgers, which everyone was quite thrilled with. After indulging, we were going to walk to Blockbuster to get a movie for the night
Circular Quay-1
. Well, we turned the wrong way off the overpass and wound up walking around Baulkham Hills for about 90 minutes. We did get the movie, and the walk home took about 10 minutes. Lia and Muscles had stopped to run around in the park for a while, so we had to wait for them to start the movie. But then we took a while getting ourselves together, and had to restart the movie about 5 times. Finally, we could bunk down and watch Pride and Prejudice before retiring. Dana and I were in Steven's bed, Lia and Tina in Catherine's, and Muscles and Brock in the guest room.Saturday we woke up and they dropped us off at the ferry wharf. We took the ferry into the city to see the view from the Harbour, and while really cool, it was cloudy. It didn't stop us from taking hundreds of pictures. When we got in, we went to the Opera House so the others could go on a tour. Dana and I weren't partaking, and we walked around the Circular Quay shops and over to the UNICEF bears at The Rocks. We were idiots and blew right past the US bear, while nominally looking for it. Once we found her, we felt pretty stupid, but proceded to take touristy pictures anyway. She and I had looked around each of the restaurants on the Harbour, and we found a nice Italian place with fairly reasonable prices (everything is around $15 for lunch). We went back up to the Opera House to wait for the others to finish the tour, and we sat on the steps watching a crazy man in a dress talking animatedly to himself until he got a little too close, when we went inside to wait
Circular Quay-2
. Lunch was fabulous-I had the tortellini, and we all had water-the free kind. After lunch we headed to The Rocks Center where I ran up to the visitor's center and they hung around the didgeridoo shop. Then we walked up to the Bridge and walked part of the way across, stopping at the pylon lookout and heading back down. We still had about an hour, and I had spotted what looked like a market on the street, so I lead the way towards it. Score-The Rocks Market, Saturdays and Sundays. We spent the rest of our time there, before heading back to the CQ to catch the ferry home. Dana and I were the last two to try to board the ferry, and the guy pointed to Dana and said-Stop, we're full. Well, that wasn't going to work, so the other four got off and we instead took a bus to the train station. We caught the bus home-then it was time to dress up!
I borrowed a dress from Catherine, Lia did my hair and makeup, and Judith gave me a necklace. Everybody was quite satisfied with the result, then we got our party on. We started off with imported wine, and light finger foods. Then I cracked open a Smirnoff Ice and we continued to enjoy the finger foods. Brock taught Lia to swing dance in 30 minutes on the driveway and Judith kept sending out foods for us to enjoy all night long. The best part of the evening was towards the end when Dana dropped her entire glass of water in my lap, for no apparently good reason
Crazy guy
. Muscles, Dana and I had a good laugh about that one. Some dancing and cake and toasts later, we were ready for bed. Tina fell asleep in Brock's bed at the end of the night, and we left Brock in there with her on the other matress. The rest of us crashed in the lounge room on makeshift matresses. Sunday morning we woke up fairly late. Judith asked us if we had heard the fire alarm in the night, and none of us had, which we all got a chuckle out of. They drove us to the train station again and we caught a bus to the QVB (although we were aiming for Town Hall, they're right there by eachother). We walked down the hill past the IMAX to the harbour. We were meeting Dana's friend Andrea at the aquarium. The aquarium was awesome! They have tunnels under the seals and sharks! And a huge reef exhibit! We spent about 2 hours there, and then went to lunch at a place we had spotted on the way over-the Pontoon...every meal under $10! I got lamb kebabs, which were overpriced since I only got two, but they were really tasty. After that, we walked back up the hill to the QVB and split up for another two hours of shopping (with 5 floors, it was necessary). I got a sweet drawstring bag with a flat lambskin platypus inside. Tina and I also stopped by the gelato place (Mondo) and I got tiramisu to enjoy. And enjoy it I did. We walked back to the CQ and caught the 6:15 ferry to Manly to watch the sunset. Not so spectacular on the way over, and behind a hill once we were there, so that was a bum attempt
FREE
. I grabbed a burger at McDonald's, because I thought we were going right back. However, we dilly dallied for a while and the others decided to get some pizza. While we were waiting for that, we spotted Jim Serfass' long lost twin, and I had to confuse Muscles to get a picture of this phenomenon (I was fake taking a picture of him outside the pizza place). They ate on the wharf, then we went insdie to Max Brenner's and chose a chocolate pizza. Max Brenner's is a chocolate cafe, where everything is chocolate. The pizza was amazing (and worth every penny of my $2.50 contribution)! Then we went to sit by the ferry entrance to avoid a repeat of Saturday's ferry mishap. It was really cool to see the city at night, but none of my pictures are particularly breathtaking, because I was using the boucing boat as my tripod. Oh well. Then there was a small amount of tension about how we were getting home. We knew the train would be fine, but couldn't remember what time the last bus left the Parramatta station. As we were trying to puzzle this out, Judith called to see what our plans were. She said it would be faster if they picked us up at the Marriott, and gave me directions to get there. Now, the things about travelling with people is that sometimes parts of messages get lost. So we didn't follow her directions to the Marriott, and wound up thinking we had lost the building somewhere, but really it was right there. We waited for another 10 minutes and we were on our way home. We pulled everything out into the lounge room and tried to watch an episode of BBC's version of The Office, but we were all pooped, and turned it off in favor of sleep.
This morning we got up and ate breakfast with Annette (who as it turned out was guilty of the fire alarm-she was making toast for her friend). We chilled until everybody got up, and then Judith ran us to the train station. We picked a kind of inefficient train home, and I again slept on it. We were at the Newcastle Station, and caught a bus home.
