Life in a big city: Sydney

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In the morning, we went for a walk (we didn’t have our car anymore!) with Douwe. We walked through Darling Harbour and the Royal Botanic Gardens to the Opera House. It was a very nice walk, with people having photo shoots in from of the river. We thought the Opera House looked nicer and more impressive at night from the viewpoint we had been to the night before. It turns out the Opera House is three different buildings! The number of tiles covering the roofs, 1 million, is quite impressive. The building of the Opera House was expected to take about 4 years and ended up taking 14 years - and involved 10,000 workers.
We had lunch in the food court at Chinatown again, trying some delicious Vietnamese spring rolls. In the afternoon, I had a rest (I was still sick) while the guys went for a walk. I had a long chat with a roommate, Matthew, from Scotland. Douwe and Shaun made fajitas for dinner while I went to the shop to buy some extra tortillas and some beer with Matthew as he was joining us for dinner. The four of us had dinner together.
We were a bit worried about the weather as we had heard there was a high risk of flash floods. It started raining early morning and it didn’t stop all day. But, thankfully, there was no flood where we were. We arranged with the hostel to stay in for the day and we only got out to get some lunch. Our flight to Christchurch, in New Zealand, was delayed because of the poor weather conditions so we took our time and made our way to the airport in the early evening.

Overall, I wasn’t that impressed with Sydney. People say there are many things to do - which there probably are, but you can really do most of the attractions in a couple of days. But I am biased, not being a fan of crowds and big cities! Shaun agreed with me, though, that we preferred Brisbane. Jobs would have probably been far easier to find in Sydney but we wouldn’t have enjoyed living there as much.

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