Hello, this is not only my first post on this site but also my first blog post ever, thank you, thank you. You will notice that my posts, as opposed to Heather's (Boffcat's) will contain fewer long words and have a severe lack of correct punctuation,.  I will also change tenses a lot because I know that leads to an exciting read.

Heather left off on the 5th, so I think a good place to start would be what happened on the 6th. Well I started with a boiled egg, an egg I bought at a very high place from a place called Coles. I also bought some bread and Vegemite so I could have some soldiers with my egg. I under-boiled my egg and it tasted weirdly of fish, the Vegemite was nice though, kind of like weak Marmite with the consistency of Nutella. In a one-on-one fight though I think Marmite would win. I digress. We thought we would have a wander down to the Harbour and then take it from there.

We are staying in a little studio apartment thing which happily still thinks it is in the 80's, it is on the edge of Hyde Park if you fancy a google. Walking through the park there were lots of these funny green things all over the ground (below), I had a go at breaking one open but couldn't. Anyone know what this is? I think possibly a kangaroo egg.

The temperature, I can't remember, let's say 26 or something around there, but there is a nice breeze so all is good. It is about a 15-20 minute walk to the Quay which is a nice promenade lined with restaurants, cafes and ice cream parlours on one side, and water, ferries and big cruise liners on the other. There was this little fish stall selling all kinds of weird things alongside fish and chips and other deep fried goodness. I got a weird thing (Thai octopus salad) and some deep fried squid rings as my previous thing had "salad" in the title. H opted for some grilled type of fish, which was tastier than mine, but she was given free chips which I ate, so that made up for it. 

The Quay goes all the way from the Opera House on one side to a place called The Rocks on the other. Having seen the Opera House already in Finding Nemo we decided to go to The Rocks. The Rocks, I assume, is one of the oldest parts of Sydney and is where the first European settlers came ashore way back in 1788. It feels like a little ramshackle European town with winding alleys and houses and shops built all over the rocks wherever there are gaps.

Found some pretty interesting items for sale including a kangaroo scrotum bottle opener and some purses made out of toads. These are probably the equivalent of fluffy toy Haggises and Walker's Shortbread in Edinburgh but I still had to stop my self from purchasing the scrotum bottle opener. Not far down from the scrotum shop I got a hat, made out of paper believe it or not, you will see the hat often in future photos. Heather is still on the hunt for a hat.

We had a coffee and juice in a french style cafe place and then I wandered back to the flat to try and get some work done whilst H carried on wandering, stumbling across this place, the Victorian Strand Arcade.

7th January

My egg didn't taste of fish this time, but I still under-boiled it. Does water boil at a lower temperature in the Southern hemisphere? It was a lot cooler today, so we thought we would get a walk in, one of the walks recommended by our guide book. We headed back to the quay, via an arty monument of lots of broken bits of old buildings and really cool tree, which H climbed.

Check out the hat.

We walked up to the Opera House first and had a peek through some of the windows. It felt to me like a 70's vision of the future. This was the only photo of the Opera House we managed today:

It was a real surprise, to me at least, that the entire Opera House is covered in these ceramic tiles.

Now it was lunchtime, but we had made a picnic lunch for the walk so I made do with an ice-cream milkshake  thingy, and then H got a sorbet which I had some of too. We went to wharf (probably my new favourite word of the day) 3 and got two return tickets to a place called Cremorne Point. After a brief disagreement over which end of the ferry was the front ( I won) we set off with really amazing views of the Harbour.

Awww.

The crossing took about 10 minutes if that, and we got off at a pontoon set into the hillside with lots of fancy houses on.  We started off at a little white lighthouse surrounded by sandstone cliffs that had been shaped into lots of funky swirls by the wind and then continued up around the peninsula surrounded by yacht moorings. 

The walk was about 3km through a weird combination of tropical looking foliage with winding water side paths and quite plush looking suburbia.  

We shared our picnic with some ants, and I secured my place as number one at olive stone spitting. Heather lost a couple of months off her life when she walked into a web with a funky coloured spider on it, and when we found an even bigger, funkier spider to oggle at the camera chose to die. Luckily their were fewer photo ops on the second half of the walk, but still really nice to get a feel for how the rich live in Sydney. Hopped back on the ferry and wandered back to the flat. H carried on wandering about the center a bit more and came back bearing an ANZAC biscuit; supposedly these biscuits are famous and rightly so as they are pretty tasty.

END.