Hi everyone,

We're now settled into the Australian life, and shockingly, love it a little too much. Our first port of call was Sydney, after yet another excitable plane journey. Infact, when we touched down it's safe to say we where a little hyper, jumping around and pointing at Australia signs. Australia, like NZ, are a little anal about what can be bought in the country and what can't, and we got a little scared when we had to declare any food we were bringing about. Turns out they were talking about fresh fruit etc, and not 'one chocolate bar and a few boiled sweets', which is now written on our australian immigration cards. You can't be too careful!

From the airport we got the tube into the city and were pretty overwhelmed when we saw the opera house (a lot smaller in real life), and the harbour bridge. We had booked into Base hostel which was a chain of hostels we liked in NZ but we had a pretty horrible room so treated ourselves to an all girls room complete with white fluffy towels and free champagne! We really are backpackers, honest...

Our first day was spent just walking around the city and doing a little bit of shopping (oops). We fell in love with the city in about 10 minutes. Coming from NZ and everything being so small, it was really nice to be in a big city again. We also wondered into Kings Cross, and found a lovely new hostel - Eva's Backpackers- that had small rooms, actual bathrooms and even gave us easter eggs on easter sunday! Turns out it was actual in a really dodgy area and 'the cross' is a red light district...but the hostel was lovely so it was fine.

That night we met up with Alissa (from deloitte) and her friend Debra for a meal and some drunken fun involving musical chairs and paper aeroplanes...all very random but that's what all our nights out seem to be.

All the days in Sydney seem to merge into one so i'm not too sure what days we did what but here's the highlights:

One day we turned into proper tourists and went to Circular Quay to see the Opera House and the Bridge. This involved going 'omg it's amazing' every 2 seconds and taking about a million photos of the same thing. Even soph took a lot of photos which is an unusual occurence! We treated ourselves to an Opera House tour, beause well, we are closet geeks sometimes. The tour was led by Barbara, or 'Babs' as we affectionally came to call her after a while. She was a proper legend and actually lived for the opera house, bless her. Fun fact for everyone - the opera house has 1,560,006 tiles (that's meant to be 1 thousand, 56 thousand and 56 tiles but numbers confuse me). We even got to see the Royal Australian ballet company practice which was amazing.

Another day was spent on Manly beach - a gorgeous suburb of Sydney which you reach by getting the ferry across the harbour. We had lunch on the beach watching the surfers and getting slightly worried when we watched a lesson and everyone was hopeless. (God knows what we'll be like when we try it in Byron). From there we went up to Palm Beach, home of Home & Away which I don't watch but hoyle is obsessed with so she was a very happy lady. her attempts to find some of the actors failed unfortunately. The beach was stunning, but very quiet. It was actually quite hard to find but the driver of the bus was like some crazy avid fun so insisted we sit at the front so he could give as information and talk through every episode ever filmed, bless him.

Easter weekend fell while we were there and it's safe to say it was a pretty immense weekend. We spent Good Friday in Darling Habour which was so beautiful and also had some crazy circus festival going on which was actually really fun to watch. Seeing as it was a bank holiday, we clearly had to have a cheeky drink at lunch time and drinking a wine looking over darling harbour was definately not a bad way to while away a friday afternoon.... It was topped off by seeing 17 again with zac effron -perfect day!! We loved darling habour so much that we headed over there again on Easter Sunday for our 'easter sunday meal' (the term we used to justify eating out) and enjoyed a lovely steak and chips meal.

Easter Saturday was spent at the Randwick races...aren't we getting posh?! Well, actually we looked pretty shabby. As much as we tried, living out of a backpack for 7 months does not bode well for trying to get an outfit together for the races. So off we went in our flip flops and dresses, not much make up and no heels(!!). Despite being pretty underdressed and having absolutely no idea how to place a bet we had an amazing day. For the first bet we waited in line till we saw a nice lady who looked like she could help us. We did try to sound professional by placing a bet 'each way' but didn't actually realise that that doubles the amount of money you have to bet. ah well, you live and you learn! after our first 10 dollar bet (oops), we changed the rest to 1 or 2 dollars, and mainly went on the colour of the jockey's top (pink was a top choice), or names we liked (Judge me not was our favourite as it's the rule of our friendship to anyone that knows!), but it's clear that that actually has no bearing on whether the horses win or not and we won absolutely nothing. In fact, we noticed a pattern - the horses we picked always seemed to come last...what a skill.

After months of amazing weather and no rain, I guess our luck had to run out someday. Unfortunately, the rain chose to catch up with us when we visted Bondi Beach on easter monday. So instead of soaking up some rays we got one quick photo and dived into a cafe for a hot chocolate. Bondi is actually quite overrated and we prefered Manly beach but, to be fair, it's pretty hard to find a bad beach in Australia. The rain actually turned into torrential downpours and we both ended up actually soaking.

Luckily, tuesday was back to the lovely sunshine we both know and love which meant I got to climb the harbour bridge thanks to a very lovely early birthday present from my uncle pete! (I had attempted to climb it the night before but torrential downpours and hiking up a bridge do not fit together too well. They climb in all conditions, so the poor people that had booked had to still climb...apparently in the photos you couldnt even see the opera house.) Climbing the bridge was absolutely amazing but so so scary aswell. I really lucked out with the weather which meant the view at the top was incredible...it was such a clear day you could see over to the blue mountains...I can't remember how far away they are, but it's a long way!. It was really weird doing something without Soph and the 3 1/2 hours that it took me to do is actually the longest we've been seperated the whole time we've been away! In the afternoon we treated ourselves to a Nando's and completely forgot the time which meant charging through the city, backpack's on, to make it to our bus to melbourne on time. Don't know why we rushed as the overnight bus journey was no fun...no bingo or s.american's to look after us - bring back AndesMar!

SJ x