Sydney...pictures yet to come

I think I may have fallen in love with another city, besides Chicago :) Although we only had a weekend in Sydney, we managed to fill our time and see so much and I loved every minute of it. I have to admit the hotel wasn't as great as it looked on the internet, but it worked, and really we were only there to sleep.

Saturday morning we took an early start and headed into the city to catch a sightseeing bus, and then hopped off in a few stops to catch a ferry around the harbour. Eventually we got off at the Sydeny Opera House...Amazing. We toured that and learned so much about its history, and the politics and money involved in its building. Just as an example, it was supposed to take 4 years to build and took 14, and was supposed to cost 4 million dollars and cost 102 million....ooops. :) But I think it was well worth the time and money. We then caught a bus to Centre point, the Sydney observation tower, to go on a virtual tour of Australia and then check the view of Sydney from the second highest point in the Southern hemisphere. We then walked around a while, somehow finding ourselves running into the Prime Minister of Turkey...random...but I got a picture. We then bused around the city to sightsee a little more, and then found ourselves for dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe Sydney. After dinner we walked around some shops and caught the monorail to the aquarium...fishies! The aquarium here is really top notch. You get to walk on glass floors with fish below you and even walk under tunnels with fish above you. By that time is was nearly 10pm, so we caught a cab and headed back to the hotel...exhausted.

Sunday we slept in an extra half hour...weee! We then decided to start at the Opera House to catch a few more photos, and then slowly make our way back along the harbour. We headed into a market called The Rocks, ate lunch at Hungry Jack's (aka Burger King), shopped at the Queen Victoria Building (but more window shopped..because yikes it was expensive), visited the Chinese gardens which was very peaceful, walked around Darling Harbour a bit, enjoyed a street performer, and eventually made our way back to the hotel to grab our luggage and catch our flight back to Melbourne.

Now its Monday, and I am back at school for my last week in Australia. I am pretty much home free at this point because the kids have activity week all week, so not really much teaching to do, but I got my three full weeks in already anyway. Tuesday we are going roller skating, Wednesday swimming, Thursday movie theater, and Friday Christmas partying!

Pictures should be up tomorrow...