heather's amazing stuff

Yes, I know we're no longer in Australia, but play along with us. If you were reading Rob's blog then you know that we didn't have access in Melbourne (or rather it wasn't convenient) but he was able to find some time on a computer at the airport and post that before we took off. He tried to put something on my page but the access timed out right as he was uploading it so I don't think it took.

Day 5 in Sydney was a Saturday and unless you were hanging out in the tourist part of Sydney, a lot of places were closed. This was the first day we started our search for opals. I was getting antsy thinking that we were cutting it close and wouldn't be able to find any anywhere else. I figured w/Sydney being bigger than Melbourne, we'd get better deals on souvenir and novelty type items.

We walked to this open air mall area and it was already late enough for lunch. The malls there are very pretty and while there were none of the same stores, I did find comparable places, just different names.



We went to a restaurant called "Sky Phoenix." It had some great furniture in a lounge type area. I'll let Rob post more of that.



and had some great dim sum.



We took pictures of our food when we remembered, which was more than not. This happened to be a cool meal and yes, those are little pumpkins in the left corner of the picture. They were friend in a sweet batter and very good!

After this, we went to the opal museum and store, which was one of the main reasons we headed to this area. It was a bit late (well for the Sydneysiders apparently) when we got there and even though it said they were open till 5:00, they started telling people they were closing in about 10 minutes (which was really 4:30). We got to look around the museum and bought some necklaces. I got a cool opal that was set in a setting that was the outline of a kite. If I hadn't seen that, I wouldn't have gotten anything there. Being a Theta, how could I have passed that up?!!

Next we were off to the Rocks as it seemed that everything in that area was closed, or closing. When we got over to the Rocks, we saw that they were having a farmer's market in the middle of the street. Of course we had to walk through that as I love farmer's markets.



We found some little trinkets to take back home and then walked on over to the water. On our way over we got an ice cream from an Australian ice cream truck. It was weird though as it wasn't that cold and it was more the consistency of whipped cream than ice cream but it had Cadbury "flake" sticks in it, so that made up for it!

We walked over by the beginning of the harbour bridge and had a cool view of the Opera House. Imagine getting to see that every day. I guess it'd be similar to getting to see the Golden Gate every day.



We also saw some cool waterfront apartments but I'll save some pics for Rob to post. If he doesn't, I will but we didn't take as many pictures towards the end of our stay. I don't know if we were tired, or just wanted to soak it all in.

That night we went to the aquarium. It was pretty big and had some great exhibits. Unfortunately we got in right in front of some rude tourists so a lot of times we had to hang back so they could go around us. They bumped into us quite a few times and would blow through the exhibits.

I saw some really cool colored starfish that I hadn't seen before as well as another cool fish in the same tank. I tried to take a pic of the two together but the fish kept getting away. Pardon me if this is a little blurry but Rob is working on my picture taking skills!



Rob can post more of the aquarium.

The day ended with us going to dinner and we crashed. I started getting sad because not only was our trip more than 1/2 over, our stay in Sydney was coming to an end and I wanted to make sure we'd done everything we could. We did find a book that was called "Sydney in a week" and according to this book, we'd done everything we were supposed to.

Tomorrow--more roaming.