Sydney Times

---

I stayed in Sydney for about 3 or 4 days before Christmas. I enjoyed walking through the Sydney Botanic Gardens and seeing hundreds of bats roosting in the trees. I also went to the aquarium and saw the shark tank and some turtles and penguins.

Probably my greatest find in Sydney was a restaurant on some random back alley in King's Cross. The Prague is a Czech restaurant with really good beer and really good, large portion meals with lots of meat. In other words, a perfect restaurant. Ya, the waitresses were cute too.

Hyde Park in central Sydney is also really nice, lots of big trees overhanging wide foot paths and a fountain. Good place to read a book.

I returned to Sydney for 2 days around Jan 9-10th. I was invited to go sailing with a climber I met in the blue mountains and so I took the train from Maitland to Newcastle to Sydney. It was a bit of an epic to get to the yacht club on time. I missed my first train by about 2 minutes and had to wait another 1/2 hour for the next. Then when I got to Sydney Central I had only 45 minutes to get to the yacht club all the way at one of the harbours and I had me huge pack on and urgently had to find a restroom. It was really bad, I went down so many tunnels and up and down stairs and took another train and got to Bondi junction and still hadn't found one. I went through the turnstiles when I shouldn't have and then snuck back in only to find the washroom closed for cleaning. Anyways I wasted a lot of time finally walking to some random mall outside of the train station so I though I'd miss my boat, literally.

I took a cab to the harbour and phoned my friend and guess what? She was only 2 minutes walk away and I was in exactly the right spot. We ran into the bar and I dropped my bag next to some lockers and jumped on a boat within like 5 minutes. The first sail boat race was 2 hours long and we were in a really small boat. I got soaked completely and repeatedly for two hours, it was great.Re ally great, this was the day after the funeral and it felt really good to feel the wind and the sun again. I got to do a lot of the actual work too since it was such a small boat. The first time I saw the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Sydney Opera House was from this boat on the race, pretty cool.

The second race was a couple of hours later and on a much bigger boat. I didn't do any work on this race, I just sat on the railing and enjoyed the ride. I'm glad I did though, one of the other sailors who talked their way on for the race had a accident and ripped the foresail ( = very expensive ).

I didn't get any pictures of the races, it was kind of frantic/no time on the small boat and I didn't want to be a complete tourist on the big one. Good memories though.

---