Thursday 1st January 2009

We got to the aiport early as we had nothing to do on Sunday. The flight was ok and was about 7hours long. We got a minibus from the airport to our hostel - YHA Bondi Beachouse. It was comforting to see normal buildings made of bricks and normal cars again! We couldn't check in till 2 pm so we wandered down to bondi beach which was very nice. Everyone seems very health obsessed here because there were hundreds of people walking or running along the beach and costal path.

On Tuesday we spent the day at the beach again. It was very hot and busy. Chris tried a bit of body boarding as we could rent them for free from our hostel. We are not used to how expensive Sydney is, especially along the sea front.

Yesterday was New Years Eve. We went to one of the viewing points near harbour bridge - Mrs Macquiries Chair in Botanical Gardens. We got there about 11am and the queue was already all the way around the park. It took us 5hours to queue in the mid day heat but it was ok as we had lots of food with us and there were some friendly people in front of us who we chatted to. When we got in, there weren't many good place to sit so we just sat anywhere and waited til night time. As it started to get dark loads of really big bats started flying around. At 8.30pm there were some projections and lights on the bridge but we couldn't really see them. There were some good fireworks at 9pm for the families. Then we had to wait til midnight for the big fireworks across the bridge and on the nearby skyscrapers. It was very exciting! We had a good view of he bridge and the fireworks were great.