Saturday morning we both decided to do different things - Liam wanted to visit the Maritime Museum and Claire wanted to go back to Glebe Market. It was absolutely throwing it down with rain so we both got really wet on separate parts of the city, but managed to find our way back at lunchtime to meet at Bar 333. Whenever we go there it's never as busy as when we drive past on the bus... but either way it does a mean toasted sandwich. We had an afternoon spare before our evening plans, so we did a bit more food shopping and chilled out in the dry and warm before we visited the Observatory.

They had a Festival of Stars on so we trooped through the rain (en route we bumped into Liam's friend Sophie from uni in the middle of the city....... so strange!) to the top of the hill near The Rocks and got there just in time to receive a couple of vouchers for free glasses of wine, thankyou very much, and one of the first chances to watch a short film in the 3D Theatre. It's a shame it was raining so hard as it meant a lot of the telescopes set up couldn't be fully operated. We listened to a few talks from some of the university lecturers about the methods of finding planets, queued up to see Saturn through the massive telescope outside, then climbed up into the North & South domes to see the 100 year old restored telescopes. It was cool to see the actual machinery, but we drew a line at when they suggest, because of the weather, the only thing we could look at would be Harbour Bridge in the rain. Well, to think we could just go outside and see that, we left a couple of hours later.

Sunday morning it was still looking cloudy but we raced down to Mrs Macquarie's Point in the Botanical Garden in the hopes of seeing some more fab views of the Harbour (you can never see too many angles of Sydney). Unfortunately, it was still really cloudy when we got there so the journey was a bit of a waste, but to make up for it we walked along the Gallery Road and had a nip into the NSW National Gallery. It was impressive (not quite as brilliant as the Tate though) and housed a large collection of Asian art from Korea, Indonesia, China, Nepal & India, some of which was dated back to 700AD! After mooching around here we braved the rain, and got rather scared walking down Speakers Corner. It wasn't very packed today, but basically this stretch of road on a Sunday is devoted to (mad) people who shout at passers-by about issues close to their hearts. Today, we were stopped by a bloke wearing multiple UFO badges. Needless to say we didn't stay to chat long.

Eventually, we found what we had really been looking for - the last day of an exhibition ofdisplaying the winners and runners-up of the World Press Journalism Photography Competition 2009. Displaying events all over the world throughout the year, we jostled in the crowds to appreciate the lengths that some photographers went to to get these magnificent shots. We were unnerved to see that many of the upper-ranking images came from the catastrophic Chinese earthquake earlier on in the year, and to think that these people would just have the responsibility to take a photo and leave - it must have been heart-breaking not to try to help first. Amongst these, other categories included Sport (mainly the Olympics, and some of our favourite images), and Portrait - both of which were very clever, and to a certain extent just a case of being in the right place at the right time.

Which leads us to today, our last day in Sydney. To think of it its actually our last day in Australia - which is strange considering it's been our home for two months. We've loved our time here, we've met some weird and wonderful people and have discovered that these days Oz is a lot more Americanised that they would readily admit.

Bring on Raro!