SubscribeOut again by myself. Sometimes I just need to be by myself so I can think and write. Too bad I was lazy and left my bag at the hotel so I am without my notebook. Usually when I travelled I sort of kept a travelog but this time I've been mostly writing about some self reflections (that I am still not sure if I should post or not). I guess now is a good time to recap what happened in the last few days before I forget everything.
Monday we got to Sydney around 8:00 or so from separate flights. Since I can't imagine how I can get around without Google maps (nevermind the fact that I've never relied on it during travel before) the first thing we did was got us each a $30 of Vodafone SIM card. That includes 500 MB of data which should be plenty for 10 days. The plan also has a ridiculous voice portion which charges local calls more than it charges international calls back to the US. We joked that it's probably cheaper for us to call home and do a 3-way conference call than it is calling each other directly.
Anyhow.
Afterwards we took the train to Central station and walked to our hotel. Of course the room wasn't ready yet so we had to leave our bags and then just strolled around. Eventually we wandered to the Rocks area and had a ridiculously expensive and small and poorly serviced lunch. There are so many Japanese restaurants in Sydney and if you only count those that Google maps know about, Japanese restaurants are even more dominant. That's actually quite funny consider that we couldn't walk a block without hearing someone speaking Korean and yet we could hardly find a Korean restaurant in the first few days. Interestingly Yelp insists that Australia doesn't exist so it's useless during this trip.
That was pretty much the first day. In the evening I tried to find a bar but at 9 most of the bars were pretty empty. I guess that's a Monday night afterall.
Tuesday we went to the Taronga Zoo which was well worth the $30 which includes the ferry ride. We pretty much spent the whole day there and were super tired at the end of the day. Maybe because some people got Australia day off bars on that Tuesday night was much better occupied. I couldn't resist a cool beer in a hot evening so I went to this 3 monkeys bar and grabbed a drink. Unlike back home no one seem to drink at the bar here (there's no seats there at all) so I spent the 10 minutes or so awkwardly by myself. Oh well.
Australia day was basically a giant festival and I didn't do much except people watch and getting sunburned. Oh that and took lots of pictures, but that's true everyday so it's probably not worth mentioning specifically. I guess Maritime Museum was interesting too, I didn't know Britain sent shiploads of kids to Australia as child labor. There were fireworks at night but that wasn't particularly spectacular compared to other fireworks that I've seen. Thursday we walked over the Harbour Bridge because climbing it was expensive and we decided it's not worth $200 to spent 2.5 hour learning how to walk across and just an hour climbing. It's quite a bit shorter than Golden Gate Bridge but nothing particularly interesting.
Friday and Saturday were kind of boring. Australia museum was totally not worth the $10 but Museum of Sydney probably was. Of course neither could be compared to the NSW Art Gallery which was well worth the $0. The collection mostly consists of traditional oil paintings. The contemporary pieces were pretty legitimate while the bullshit "modern arts" were all well hidden at a corner at the basement. Good job there.
That's pretty much it for Sydney.