Syndey = Opera House

Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore: lightswitches turn on by flipping down, it's dark at 5:30

Shorlty after my last post, Ching and I impulsively decided to hop a bus and go down to Circular Quay (pronounced "key") to see the Opera House. We weren't really convinced that we were in Sydney yet, and thought that might do it. It did. We stepped off the bus, rounded a corner, caught our first glimpse of the Opera House, squealed, and then couldn't stop giggling for about 5 minutes. Thank goodness digital cameras with large memory cards don't run out of film. We were there as the sun was setting, which was much earlier than we expected. It was totally dark by about 5:30.

Ching was wearing her University of Guelph biomed sweatshirt. As we were walking along a path at the water's edge in the Royal Botanic Gardens, we passed a couple sitting on the wall. The guy called out "Are you from Guelph?" in a very familiar accent. Turns out they're from Waterloo. What are the odds?

Eventually even the novelty of the Opera House was not enough to keep us going, and we grabbed a bite to eat, headed back to Newtown, got more to eat (I found a place with really good, and cheap, tabouli), and then went back to enjoy our last night in a single room. It was odd watching an "all new" ER that was on months ago in Canada.

The birds woke us up again in the morning, although this time we weren't crazy enough to jump out of bed to see them. We spent Friday at the aquarium, after tossing aside the useless bus maps and just going out to a bus stop and asking the first driver how to get there. The Sydney Aquarium is very close to my heaven. It's incredible. We could have spent the entire 6 months there. Or at least I could have. And guess what? There were 2 touch tanks, and the Great Barrier Reef one contained a rainbow coloured Holothuroidean (sea cucumber). It made my day. And Nora's a few minutes ago. Invert students are odd that way. The underwater viewing areas for the seals and sharks are tunnels underwater. Having a HUGE stingray pass overhead is pretty wild, even when you're just in a tube and the ray is in a tank. There was a shark resting on top of one of the tubes, giving a lovely view of some rather sizable claspers, and allowing me the opportunity to explain to Ching that those nasty looking things are inserted into the female during mating. You don't want to be a female shark. I could go on all day about the aquarium, but I do need to have breakfast and accomplish some house hunting. (We discovered that right when the common room opens is when the computers are free)

After the aquarium, we went to the Victoria Building and wandered around. It's a beautiful old building that is now a mall with stores most people can't afford to shop in. We realised it was getting late and we were hungry, so we headed for the bus stop, passed a Woolworth's and decided to do our grocery shopping there, nearly got crushed in the grocery store, managed to make it out with some food, waited for a bus on the wrong street, checked the actually usefull maps in the bus shelter, and walked over to the right street. For some reason the bus routes are completely different depending whether you're going north or south. No retracing the route. We cooked spaghetti and tomato sauce in the kitchen at Billabong Gardens. After dinner, in an attempt to stay up until a reasonable hour to go to bed, we downloaded pictures from my camera and checked them out on a screen larger than a thimble. There are some pretty neat shots. I can't wait to get them online.