the daily(ish)

View of the harbor and Hyde Park from our hotel lounge…

Yes, we suck.

1 1/2 out of 3

Our weekend in Sydney was good, although not exactly what we planned considering it was plagued by gloomy weather. 

We had a tough time making it out to the rugby stadium on Friday evening and ended up only seeing the second half.  My team lost to Russell Crowe’s stupid bunnies…

Seriously?  I thought rugby was a pretty tough sport, but hey, they did beat the eels and I can’t say much for their mascot either…

 

I enjoyed the game, not as much as American football, but it was much more enjoyable than soccer for me.

We had planned a beach day for Saturday, but it was raining on and off so we decided to catch the ferry over to the zoo.  Although we did get up close and personal, we didn’t actually get to pet the koalas…

When the one on the right decided to slide down on top of the one on the left and the one of the left proceeded to bite the living heck out of the one on the right’s butt I was actually happy we weren’t allowed to touch them.  Apparently, koalas get very cranky when they’re trying to sleep and they sleep like 20 hours a day. You do the math.

They were ridiculously cute though…

I did get to see the duckbill platypus, but no photos to show for it.  They’re extremely shy little creatures and although he/she did quite a show for us swimming the exact same route over and over and over, the lighting was horrible and it was doing said route at a pretty high speed. I’m obviously not that talented of a photographer.  It was much smaller than I expected, like as long as a loaf of bread and very cute.

Taronga Zoo is pretty big and it took us 4 hours to make our way through it. I felt like most of their habitats were way too small for the animals though and it made me a little depressed.  It was definitely a world away from the wildlife habitat we visited in Cairns.

Sadly, my oyster feast was not to be this weekend.  Storms kept rolling through on Sunday and we decided not to take the ferry out to the beaches or go to the fish market. 

We don’t get many lazy Sundays together these days,  so it was nice just hanging out together not doing much.  I mean who wouldn’t want to hang out with my Wife?  She’s pretty freaking awesome…

 

Pics from the zoo…

the daily(ish)

This narrow beam that runs just above the streets is what carries Sydney's monorail. I have to say it is a little disconcerting to me when the train cars go zooming overhead...



Hence, why I only have a photo of the rail itself.

the daily(ish)

Okay, seriously, these beaks make me nervous...



These things are all over Sydney. I'll take a flying rat over these eye-gougers any day.

Sydneysiders

We’ve decided to stay put this weekend and enjoy Sydney. Our jet lag is finally starting to wane so we can finally stay up until a decent hour. We’re still waking up at 5am or so, but I’m hope that is about to end soon.

Tonight we’re headed to our first rugby game. I kept calling it a “match” but was informed by a nice Aussie guy that they don’t speak the Queen’s English around here and they call them “games’.

We’re seeing the Rabbitohs vs. the Eels. I’m pulling for the Eels and shockingly enough (pun totally intended) it isn’t because of their team colors. I have this thing about Russell Crowe, specifically, that I can’t stand him. The aforementioned nice Aussie guy told me that he’s a big owner of the Rabbitohs.

So, easy enough…GO EELS!

We’re planning to go to the zoo, the fish market and maybe to one of the nearby beaches if the weather is nice. I’ve got the Weather Channel app on my phone, but it always seems to be wrong about the weather here. It said it would only be 72 and cloudy (20 degrees for my international readers) today and it’s 81 (25 Celsius) and gorgeous. It said it would be in the low 70’s (20’s)all next week so I thought their fall weather was upon us, but all I see are shorts and flip flops all around me. Who knows. Hopefully the weather will hold out and we can get to a beach at some point.

We had planned to stay the last weekend of the audit as well, but now we’re toying with trying to go somewhere. As usual, we’ve run out of weekends for all there is that we want to do. Tough burden to have, isn’t it? Guess we need to cram in as much as we can this weekend.

My main goals for the weekend are to pet one of these…

see one of these…

and eat lots of these…

Happy weekend to everyone!!

where the women glow and the men thunder

We've arrived in Australia!! 20+ hours of travel is never easy, but we decided to pay the piper and use miles to move up to the front of the plane so, it could have been worse. I didn't get a ton of sleep due to the incredible amount of turbulence that plagued almost our entire flight from LAX --> SYD, but I did catch up on 4 movies, so not a total loss.

We arrived around 8:30am and ended up having to wait almost 4 hours before our room was ready. Not exactly cool when you'd give your right arm (your stinky, funky, "been in a plane for 20+ hours" arm) for a shower. We did see Chuy from Chelsea Lately getting in a cab when we arrived though, so that was cool. I would have asked for a picture, but I didn't want him telling some story about a greasy American girl who smelled like a goat approaching him in Australia. According to the bellman, Chelsea had just left the day before.

dang. it.

After we got into a room and freshened up, we met up with El Diablo's friend from Spain who's lived in Sydney for a year. He graciously played tour guide and took us down to the harbor to see the bridge and famous Opera House...





We then made our way to "the Rocks" neighbohood and found a table at a German beer garden to enjoy the glorious Sydney sunshine.

We'd only been out for 4 or so hours, but we were all hitting the wall and decided to head back to the hotel. We popped up to the lounge to hang with the rest of the team and have a couple of nightcaps before crashing.

Amazingly enough, the Wife and I stayed up until 9pm and only woke up once at 5am before sleeping until a more Godly hour. This is a HUGE jet lag accomplishment. Or I was just wiped from only sleeping a whopping 3 hours (in 20-30 minute increments) on the way over. We're currently 15 hours ahead due to you guys springing forward this weekend. Apparently, we'll be 16 again when Sydney does their daylight savings in April. I'm sure we'll struggle for a couple of weeks getting on track, but I'm feeling pretty human-like today and that's better than I expected.

Australia has always been the Wife's #1 location she wanted to visit in all the world and from the moment the landing gear dropped out of the bottom of the plane, she's been estatic...



which in turn makes me estatic. We've got some pretty high expectations this round and so far we're thinking it is going to live up to the hype.

Photos from the day...




p.s.- I've got a lot of catching up to do and had all but abandoned the blog while working at home. Sorry!! I promise to get caught up!!