Craig & Sam Down Under

Hey everyone!

We’re still in Sydney and getting pretty fed up with Big-City Life. We haven’t met any English people yet! There are lots of Germans and Japanese people, plenty of annoying Americans but no Brits, booo! Still haven’t been called Bruce or Sheila, although we did overhear someone saying ‘Strewth!’ the other day. Teehee.

Since our last entry we have been continuing our tourist-ing around the city, trying to spend as much time as possible away from the hostel and visiting the free and cheap attractions in order to save money. On Saturday we went to the aquarium, saw some ace sharks and crocs, lots of nemo’s and dory’s (yay yay yay!) and lots of other cool stuff. That was our greatest extravagance so far at $21 entry each (about a tenner each) and we got to see Darling harbour too. We went on the monorail (2 quid each!) and instead of gettin off at our destination we decided to go aaaallll the way around just once and then get off where we planned to, just to make sure we hadn’t missed out on seeing anything! Then in the afternoon we went to the Police and Justice Museum, which Craig enjoyed immensely, pointing out how similar the cells were to those we have at home. Yesterday we went to some nice markets down at The Rocks and there was loads of gorgeous stuff, ornaments, photos, paintings so I’ve mentally decorated our imaginary home for when we get back!

The best thing we’ve done so far was last night and we have to say a massive massive thankyou to everyone who slipped us a few quid before we left, saying ‘have a drink on us Down Under’. Well, we certainly did and we did it in style, so Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everybody! We decided it would be nice to see the harbour, the opera house, the bridge and the gorgeous walks down on the front by Hyde Park at night, but since our hostel is located on the outskirts of a particularly dodgy area, we weren’t feeling too confident about walking around at night. So we booked ourselves on a cruise ship for a 2 hour cruise of the harbour, with a 3 course meal and bottle of wine included, walked down to the harbour while it was still early and had a fabulous romantic evening on the boat before splashing out on a taxi back. It was a wonderful treat and the food was amazing. Craig had a prawn and noodle parcel to start, followed by fillet of beef (he reckons Aussie beef is better than the British stuff now!) and Sam had a tuna medallion on a bed of rice to start, followed by salmon fillet with chilli potatoes (mum you should be so so proud, I’m officially a fish-eater). We both had a blood orange sorbet for pud. There was a live jazz band on board and we’ve got some great photos of the sights at night. Thanks again everybody, it was awesome.

Now I don’t want to lower the tone here but there’s some other funny stuff to tell you. Firstly, as we were walking through the park the other day, there was a truck driving by carrying a load of rubbish and the slogan across the cab said “DIAL-A-DUMP” naturally we laughed and thought of Dad J. Then when we were in town, Craig over heard two Aussie grannies chatting (you have to try to read this with the Aussie accent…) “There’s flaming homosexuals all over the place down there, the little buggers are everywhere!”. Funny. We’ve found Gary Glitter – he’s living in the park down the road, shouting random crap at passers by (there are a lot of hobos in the city).

There’s a TV in our room so we’ve watched a couple of films as well as Oz Ready Steady Cook, Oz Survivor, and Oz Pop Idol, looking forward to the Oz version of Ladette’s to Ladies.

I’m just rambling now so gonna leave it there for today. Love you all (still) and hope everyone is well. Please keep us posted with whatever’s going on at home right now. Give Charlie, Sam, Marley and Louie lots of cuddles for us.

Sam & Croc Dundee

PS if you look at the image at the top of the page, the ferry in the bottom left hand corner of the picture is the same as the one we did our day time harbour cruise on last week!

This entry was posted on Monday, October 3rd, 2005 at 6:27 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.