It seems more people are following my German blog now than my English one, so I will probably predominantly blog in my German blog now. Here’s the address: http://devanna.wordpress.com.
I’m still going to fill you in, though. ;)
In the last few days we went to Manly [wiki], which is this suburb of Sydney that can be reached by a ferry from Circular Quay. There’s a part of it called North Head that is supposed to have a great view, and it does have a great view indeed, but the view is basically from a parking lot. It’s a bit of a disappointment, really, that the whole part doesn’t really seem to be made for your average hiker/tourist but rather for people that came with a car. Here’s where Manly got its name:
“Manly was named by Capt. Arthur Phillip for the indigenous people living there, “their confidence and manly behaviour made me give the name of Manly Cove to this place”.” [wiki]
Another day we did the free tour through the Royal Botanic Gardens, which was really interesting. The guide, a volunteer, knew something about pretty much every tree and he explained everything about all the different ferns to us and the birds and who planted what tree and such. I really enjoyed it, even though it meant walking through the heat for 1.5 hours.
After that tour, we went to Pancakes On The Rocks, which was recommended to my sister through someone. It’s an interesting restaurant where they sell mostly (but not only) pancakes, and I had The Ultimate, which was two crepes with a cheesecake-like filling:
It was very rich, of course, and I’m glad it wasn’t any more than it was or I might’ve had to barf. There’s just so much sweetness a person can take.
Also that day we went to the Sydney Observatory, where we looked at the sun through a telescope. It was basically a red disc with a little bit of activity on one side of it. Also included in the price of $7 was a viewing of a 3D movie about asteroids, which was also pretty neat.
Then yesterday we went to the Queen Victoria Building, which was pretty but the stores were mostly expensive clothing stores. Then we went on to the Chinese Garden of Friendship, which was also nice, but kind of overpriced at $6, as it’s basically just a small park. But it had a waterfall and bamboo and whatnot, and so it was nice as a little oasis in the big city.
Then I made my sister go all the way to Star City with me, which is the casino in Sydney, and the walk was long and painful through the heat, only to find that as casinos go, it’s one of the more boring ones. They didn’t have a theme like casinos in Las Vegas do, and nobody brought you free diluted drinks and so basically it was just a bunch of slot machines and some roulette tables and such.
To go back, we used the monorail, which was kind of cool, and I bought two Australia T-shirts for $8 each because apparently my sister brought more t-shirts than me and I don’t want to have to wash my clothes before she does. Not much else happened that day, except that we booked a flight to Melbourne on the 19th. That’s where we want to seriously look for jobs then.
Today was a rainy day that we spent checking out the trains that go to Katoomba/The Blue Mountains, which we then scheduled for Monday, and apart from a stop to Starbucks we only saw the Australian Museum, which had a cool display of all sorts of different skeletons. They also had minerals and Dinosaurs and what not, but the skeletons impressed me most.
That’s basically all we did in the last few days. Look at my Oz Album at tinypic for some more images and feel free to leave a comment.
