Wooo I am pooped. Unfortunately we do NOT get a lot of down time here so this is gonna be a quick post to update on the day:
-Woke up early to do a workout (in the gym, sadly, not running the beautiful weather outside). while I was biking I was watching the Australian news and aussie version of Disney Channel, both which were so funny. First of all, Aussies are not obsessed with the weather like us Americans. The weather portion of the news was literally a 10 second segments of a map of the entire Australia with maybe three cities highlighted, and the weatherman was like, "the weather today looks fine, that is all". Also, this whole reverse season thing is still new to me. There were a bunch of commercials for kids toys and theme parks that were like, "this summer 2012-2013, keep cool by exploring our new water park!" weird, right? AND I saw a special on a Tasmanian Devil who bore surprising low resemblance to the looney toons creatue we all love
-We went on a walking tour of the city led by our very well-versed Aussie leader, Russ, who is absolutely fantastic. He told us all about how the original Australians were sent as banished convicts from Europe (England, Ireland, etc) in 1788 and had to basically build the country from scratch, even though they were short, sick, not motivated, underskilled criminals. For example, the city's first architect was hand picked by the governor simply because it was noted that he had some considerable writing and drawing skill. How was this discovered? He had been convicted of document forgery. Also, it's funny because while many of the species of plants and animals have similar origins to what we are familiar with in the US, the isolation of the continent has allowed for very different evolution. Thus, there exist plants here that have been around since the dinosaurs (I'm talking about the Wollemi Pine tree). Also, did you know that there used to be a carnivorous version of the kangaroo that existed in the dinosaur era? They were called fangeroos. I'm not kidding!
-Another cool thing about the city: the mix of history with modern entertainment! The city is always looking to promote museums and gardens, so they open up places like historic barracks on special weekends to become a dance party, complete with a DJ and booze! For example, in the city's main art museum, people are allowed to come and dance like a regular club during special evenings throughout the year. The hilarious thing is, to keep up the museum ambiance, they give everyone a museum headset and play the music through that! So everyone is dancing individually with their headsets on. Once you take the headset off, it's just silent and you can look around at other people dancing with seemingly no music.
-The animals here are insane. I literally had a wild cockatoo and wild parrots just chilling on my shoulders and arms today in the park (I have the talon marks to prove it). This doesn't happen in real life!
-We walked through much of the city and the botanical gardens, which are absolutely gorgeous (the city is full of so much green space!) before going through an extensive photography tutorial with a guy named Paul. Because New Years' Eve is tomorrow, he taught us all the tricks of photography to be able to capture the fireworks. Now I can throw around words like aperature, shutter speed, ISO, exposure, etc. I sure as heck don't know what any of that means, but don't I sound fancy?
-After the photography session in the botanical gardens (where I got to photograph a lot of poisonous cactuses (cacti?)) We ventured off to the Circular Quay, Sydney's main harbor, which was JAM PACKED with tourists (due to NYE and also the docking of a Royal Caribbean cruise ship). The atmosphere was pretty cool; the streets were lined with arts and crafts tents and shoppers everywhere. Natalie from NSW gave us a historic tour of the city and told us all about the indigenous people and their history, along with some colonial history. We got to go to Foundation Park, visit some very old cottages, and even see an active archeological site and a brand new museum exhibit of indigenous art. Afterwards, the group was POOPED and broke off to do their own thing.
-TA Greg, Danielle, Hannah and I took the train (metro) and a bus to Bondi (Bond-eye), a breathtakingly beautiful beach carved into these jutting cliffs full of picturesque rocks and nature. We hiked three HILLY (and this is me talking as a runner!) miles all the way to Coogee, another area nearby, before heading back to Bondi by bus, we grabbed some Japanese food to eat. Now we are back at the apartment, it's nearly 10 PM, and we are adventuring out once more to experience Sydney's night lift for the first time, since everyone basically crashed last night. I myself am exhausted; I think the travel is definitely catching up with me. But, we have a free day tomorrow which means I can sleep in, so adventuring tonight it is!
Okay I thought that was gonna be a short post but I got carried away.
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