Sunday, May 6, 2007

Sydney here we are



Matt was a little delerious at the top of the stairs



Hello fellow readers!

All is well, don't worry we are doing fine and got here fine but like the rest of our travels we have a good story on how we got here.

Our flight out of Christchurch was at 1:30 so we played it safe and took a shuttle at 11am. No problem at all we got there very quick and arrived to find out we needed to have a little thing called a VISA! Pshh, who needs those anyway? Well, I guess we do. So we went over to the counter and got our $25 visa each and checked our baggage and waited for our connecting flight to Auckland. The connecting flight was easy, and arriving in Auckland we realized we had to hike from the Domestic to International terminal which was about a 15 walk from where we were at. No big deal we will still have 45 minutes. Well, turns out Auckland is one of the few airports that does not include a departure fee when you leave the country, yay for us we get to pay it and have to wait in a line to take care of it all. Sweating, we see our flight is in "final call" for boarding and we are staring down the security line of at least 60 deep! We start to panic, the security people wont let us cut in line and we have to just wait. Finally, we get through security and book it to terminal two and run right onto the flight just in time.

We arrived in Sydney! Yes, this is great not as exciting as the first big arrival into Christchurch but still very very cool. We arrive go through customs without any problems, looks like our problems are no longer! Well, for Megan at least. I on the other hand had the fun experience of waiting at the baggage claim for a long time and never saw my bag. Well, they assured me that the bag should be fine and it "happens all the time" but still, this bag has my life of two months in it i have nothing in my day pack. All is well the next day when they deliver my bag in tact and we could then start the big trip to Sydney.

So we arrived in Sydney safely and have been enjoying the city for 4 days now and realize this city is so big it can barely be done in a week! First we walked around all day seeing the sites; The rocks (a historical district with building made of sandstones, not a pile of rocks), drank at the oldest pub in Sydney (the fortune of war, drinks on you Chad! Thanks again for the OZ cash), walked part of the botanical gardens, saw many museums, walked China town and shopped through the Paddington market, and the best sight of all was MEGAN'S PARENTS!! We met up to celebrate Maury's Birthday, very cool. We spent the day shopping and site seeing, and the evening drinking. Seeing the opera house in person is unreal as well. There are so many things about it that you can't tell from pictures (like the roof is actually all tiled!) and the angles are just unreal, no matter how you look at it. This city is just amazing and vast, it is a huge change of pace from New Zealand but i think a welcome change.



View of the famous Sydney bridge...and us.




A koala gets frisky with Megan at the Sydney zoo

2 comments:

Dik Pose said...

More awesomeness... Mike said he and Mari had the same reaction to the Opera House.

Mac McCool said...

Looks terrific! The weather looks beautiful too. Any good hostel anecdotes?