In Just 3 Days

Here, I will attempt to list everything I did in the past 3 days in Sydney

I went to:
-Kings Cross
-Observatory
-Tour of the Opera house. The opera house is really cool, learned a lot of things about it. Initially it was supposed to be 3 years and 7 million dollars and ended up being 15 years and 130 million dollars. The architect who died last year, never returned to Australia to see it finished. His design was chosen by the designer of the St. Louis Arch who, in doing so, broke the competition rules as it was a world wide competition for the design. There's lots of other cool stuff but nothing really worth noting in the blog.
-Show at the Opera House (Carmina Burrana, also included Pines of Rome by Respighi and a song by Shostakovich which I didn't know initially but was very delighted to find out as I really like the Pines of Rome. The Shostakovich piece was very much in his style with trills on the violins and flutes.)
-Blue Mountains where I climbed two waterfalls
-Olympic Park
-Harbor Bridge
-Top of a pylon of the bridge (290 ft above water for $9.50 AUD vs. $180 AUD to go to the 400 ft top of the bridge)
-Darling Harbor
-Sydney Aquarium
-Cockle Bay Wharf
-Manly Beach
-Botanical Gardens
-Wooloomooloo (spelling?)
-Went out to lots of shops and stuff
-Hyde Park
-St Mary's Cathedral
-St Andrews Cathedral (Organ Playing as added bonus)
-Darrel Lea Chocolates (Australia's oldest Chocolate makers) I got something called Rocklea road along with a sampler box. The rocklea road came in several varieties, I chose the espresso one. Essentially, it was coffee infused marshmallows covered in milk chocolate with coarse pieces of nuts and coffee beans. Was pretty good to say the least.
-Worlds Largest (IMAX) theater. Saw Transformers 2 which was pretty decently entertaining though some parts I could have done without. But seeing it on that screen was downright amazing. It felt like everything was real size. The actors took up about 2 meters and the robots took up about 8 stories so it all worked out pretty well.
-Harry's famous meat pies cafe on wheels (The actual name is some combination of those words) I can now join the ranks with thousands of others including Blink 182, Jason Biggs of American Pie, and Colonel Sanders to name a few. Pretty good meat pies.

That's all I can think that I did right now but there may have been more. With the exception of taking the ferry to and from Manly Beach, I walked everywhere a distance of probably about 40 or 50 miles in the end.


Right now:
I'm sitting in a place called Patagonia in Queenstown, New Zealand. It's a really good chocolate shop with free wireless and not too far from the hostel. Queenstown itself is absolutely beautiful. I'm staying at a hostel right on the edge of a lake surrounded by mountains on all sides. Could definitely live here if it weren't for the lack of a need of aerospace engineers in the area. I've been sliding down the thermometer as in Cairns, Australia it was in the 30's and in Sydney it was in the low 20's/ teens. In Christchurch (where I had my layover) it was 8 degrees and here it's 4 degrees. I'm supposed to see Milford Sound tomorrow but I might have to do some serious rescheduling due to weather. This would involve me pushing the rest of my trip around and probably a dozen phone calls. Anyways, the flight into Queenstown was amazing. It was a pretty short flight, I fell asleep for a good part of it but it was shorter than 2 hours. In any event, we descended through the clouds and were immediately surrounded by snowy mountains and beautiful mirror lakes and flew around and winded down and around and like that we were in Queenstown. It was the smallest commercial plane I've ever been on, an ATR-72 which seets 68 people and is powered by two turbo propellers. I switched to the small plane in Christchurch where I was flown into from Sydney on a Boeing 777 operated by the United Arab Emirates airline. I have to say, that was by far the nicest airline I've ever been on. Extremely comfortable seats and on a two and a half hour flight all amentities provided. Amenities like, steamed cloth at the beginning of the flight, breakast which included: scrambled eggs with chives, steamed mushrooms, tomato ragout, some really nice vanilla mousse cake, bread, orange juice, tea/coffee, crackers and cheese (from Cracker Barrel in the states oddly enough...). The seats all had touch screen tv's with about 50 arcade style games, 100 movies or so and about 60,000 songs from all over the world along with several episodes each of about 30 tv shows. US airlines suck. Even the really short New Zealand flight on the tiny plane had tea and cookies and candies right before landing. I hardly ever get anything other than maybe a free glass of water on the planes these days. Another thing I thought was weird was that there was no security for the domestic Air New Zealand flights. I got my bags from the international gate and went through customs, checked in and simply walked to my gate no questions asked. This was good as I would have been a little pressed for time if I had to go through security.

In anyevent, my battery is getting low so I'm going to head back soon.