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Days out being a tourist Being one of the most beautiful and cosmopolitan cities in the world, Sydney obviously has many attractions and tourist hotspots which we wanted to do over the course of our stay and within half and hour of arriving in Sydney we were already passing the famous Opera house and Sydney bridge on the Manly Ferry.
We visited Taronga Zoo, located on Sydney’s north shore and were really impressed with the easy access and range of the animals. Even though James was hung-over to hell, and was puking his guts up ever 30 mins, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and our highlight had to be feeding the giraffe of which Izzy got her first closeup!
Located at Darling Harbour is Sydney Aquarium & Wildlife Park which is home to a wide range of cuddly Oz wildlife, creepy crawlies and scary fish from the depths of the seas. This got recommended to us in all the tourist books, so armed with our discount tokens (supplied by Sally) and joined the masses of tourists and visited the two attractions. We were really impressed with both, especially the aquarium as it had a great range of sharks and
huge sting rays on the Aqua tour. It was also really nice to see Izzy interacting with the animals for the first time, she seemed thoroughly entertained by koala bears and kept wanting to hold one, even though they were as big as her!
One weekend we took a lazy Sunday drive up to the beautiful Palm Beach, famous for the soap Home and Away. It is also located on the northern beaches; about 9 beaches north of Manly. This was also the weekend when Kim got attacked by the kookaburra, which will teach her for wearing some much ‘bling-bling’.
26th January is Australia day and we celebrated in true Ozzy style by going down to a secluded beach and had a BBQ with friends and family. The day commemorates the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, the unfurling of the British flag at Sydney and the proclamation of British sovereignty over the eastern seaboard of Australia. It really disappoints us that the British government still doesn’t allow us to celebrate St. Georges Day with a public holiday, and if we ever fell into the roll of Prime Minister this would be the first change we would implement!!
It turned out not to be that secluded as it seemed another 1000 or so families had the same idea, but was nice as it allowed Izzy to have her first experience of swimming in the sea and she took to it like a duck to water, which was a good sign as she had her first swimming lesson the weekend after.
The day prior to Australia day we had a boozy session in Botanical Gardens with Jim and Helen. We consumed a lot of goon, which fuelled the crazy decision to roll down a huge grass hill on top of each other, which later gave Kim a very itchy rash….bad decision!
One weekend we noticed that there was a tattoo and body piecing convention in Sydney, so we thought that we would show off our new ‘body art’ and mingle with the ‘mis-fits’ of Australia. We tried our best to blend in, but some of these people were in a different league, some even looked from a different planet!! There were many strange and wonderful people, with tattoo’s and piecing in places you can only dream off.
One of the most disturbing things we saw was a new
fad called Scarification. Basically a design is carved into the skin using a surgical blade so that when it heals it scars in the form of the design, a little extreme by anyone’s tastes if you ask us….have a look at some of the pictures! Obviously we tried to book ourselves in for more tattoos but it was so busy they didn’t have any spare sessions.
Sydney seems to have big music festivals every other weekend, so having reviewed all the line-ups at the start of the year we chose to attend V Festival who had the likes of Snow Patrol, Killers and Duffy. Armed with several boxes of goon, we headed to Centennial Park with Jim and Helen on a beautiful autumn morning in March. For those of you who are regulars among the festival scene will know that the weather forecast never tends to be too optimistic, so when we woke up on the morning of the festival we were delighted to see there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and that we could leave the wellies and poncho at home this year!
So we kick off the morning with a glass of goon on the train
at 11am and were well on our way before arriving at the festival. First artist we saw was Duffy and we all agreed that not only was her performance pretty good, she seems to look a lot fitter in real life than what we had seen on the TV, or maybe we all had our beer-goggles on….
We continued to get drunk throughout the afternoon while watching more bangs and as it started to get dark we just chilled on the blanket getting ready to rock out for Snow Patrol and The Killers.
Snow Patrol were awesome as always, but we were a little disappointed with The Killers as they were playing a lot of their new stuff and hardly any of their ‘classics’. As we had ran out of money and alcohol we decided to beat the crowds and head off early in pursuit of a McDonalds. A double quarter pounder and strawberry milkshake later we were on the ferry heading back to manly and were home by 11:15pm in time to continue the party with a few drinks back home.
It wasn’t up to our usual crazy festival standards, but we really enjoyed ourselves and glad we went.
The fact that James didn’t leave Kim on her own for 8 hours in the rain like he did last year was also a positive point!
While we were in Sydney we went to the Sydney Opera House and several other theatres to see numerous shows including Xmas Carols at the Opera House, The Buddy Holly Show, The Winds of Shaolin, Air Supply and of course High School Musical which James bought Kim for Christmas.
One evening James went to the open air cinema, which is a huge cinema overlooking the Opera House, Sydney Bridge and skyline and saw the latest James Bond movie. If you look at the photos you will see how breath taking the view was; which was only spoilt by the consent fruit that was being dropped on our heads from the bats above us in the trees (Well we were all assuming it was fruit and bat poo!!!)
Over the long Easter weekend we went to the Sydney Easter Show with Simon, Sally and Izzy. The show is Australia’s largest annual event, a nationally iconic showcase of Australian culture and heritage and has such events as tree logging competitions, cattle judging, live music
and endless about of food stalls.
It seemed that the entire population of Sydney had descended upon the show, which attracted near to 1 million people over the weekend!
Now one thing that they have at fairs in Australia that confuses the hell out of James is something called Show-Bags. This is basically a big bag of sweets and chocolate that severs no purpose, apart from rotting the teeth of small children and making them hysterical. James’s argument was, “If you want sweets and chocolate why don’t you just go into a shop and buy it, why is it necessary to purchase a years supply in a brightly coloured bag for an extortionate rate”. Obviously he got told to shut up and stop being a tight ass, but before he could make another comment Kim had gone running off to purchase a family size bag of Cadburys chocolate.
On Easter Sunday we went around to Sally and Simon’s for an awesome BBQ and consumed lots of tasty chocolate including ‘real’ Cadburys Cream eggs imported all the way from England. We weren’t the only ones who enjoyed the chocolate, as Izzy managed to polish off 3 Easter eggs, and baring
in mind this was the first time she had tried chocolate, she was climbing the walls to say the least!! And the sugar come down was even worst, let’s just say bath time was an interesting experience. Haha.
ANZAC Day - 25 April - is probably Australia's most important national occasion. It marks the anniversary of the first major military action fought by Australian and New Zealand forces during the First World War. ANZAC stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. When Kim was asked by her work colleagues what she knew about Anzac Day, she said “Isn’t that when you sacrifice a virgin”, assuming they meant Aztec rather than Anzac. James obviously found this hilarious, and laughed so much he nearly wee’d. 2 up
Sports Despite having the second largest obesity population in the world, the Ozzy’s around Sydney and Manly all tended to be pretty toned, with perfect abs and tight asses (and that’s just the men!!) due to all the surfing they do. Obviously this put us both to shame a little and we tended to get a little embarrassed when getting out our untoned bodies and white love handles on the beach.
Fake Christmas
at michelles houseSo that we could mix in, we decided to try and get into shape, so joined the hundreds of other people running up and down Manly beach every evening. To be fair we both got into a good routine; running, going to the gym and swimming in the sea (only James did this because kim was scared of the shark) most evenings.
Rugby League is the main sport in New South Wales (NSW) and Manly’s local team - Manly Sea Eagles, were playing in the NRL final against Melbourne Storm towards the end of 2008. James went along with Simon and a few others guys to watch the game at the ANZ Olympic park stadium, and were expecting to get hammered by Melbourne as they were in good form and had beat Manly throughout the season. But to everyone’s surprise Manly played an outstanding game and won 40 - 0 !!! Obviously they all went out in Manly that evening to celebrate with the Manly fans and team and to no surprised to Kim, James came stumbling through the door at 4am a little worst for wear.
While James was working at Catch, he had the opportunity to play
in a golf competition with a dozen other guys from work. James use to play a lot of golf when he was younger and had a respectable handicap but lost interest while at university and was delighted to be playing again, even if it meant getting up at the crack of dawn for a 6:15am tee-off every Tuesday morning.
The format of the comp was the IT guys (this included James) against the Sales guys (including Simon) playing 9 holes before work, and the first team up to 12.5 points over 6+ weeks was the winner. Losing the first game to a very lucky chip in by one of the sales guys, James went on to win 5 out of his 6 games and help his team win the ‘Catch Ryder Cup’.
Xmas - NYE Christmas 2008 was the first year we had been away from our families and spent Christmas in a hot country. We didn’t know what to expect, but can tell you now it is nothing like back home. It is so hot (40+C) there seems to be no festive build up like they do back home, when starting in October! Instead Christmas
seems to spring up on you from no where.
Our Christmas began early in November where we had a ‘fake Christmas day’ at Michelle’s (Simon’s sister) house. As everyone was leaving Sydney to return back to the UK, we thought it would be nice to have a Christmas dinner with everyone and watch Izzy open her presents. The feast was amazing and included a huge turkey with all the trimmings; it was just like being at home only in shorts, tee-shirts and flip-flops!
So with all the family back in the UK, we prepared for Christmas as best we could. Luckily for James, his company closed down over Christmas meaning he got 3 weeks off, unfortunately Kim did not. Every morning, Kim bitched and moaned about getting up and said “You don’t know how lucky you are, I hate you” to James as she crawled out of bed, James just told her to close the door on the way out and fell back to sleep.
Sure enough Christmas Eve was upon us, so in order to get into the festive mood we went down to the local church with Jim and Helen to sing some carols. Unfortunately it was not
Festive romp!
Hahaha, Kim loves it, cant you tell!! what we expected and instead of singing along to the likes of ‘We wish you a Merry Christmas’ we were subjected to over an hours worth of preaching about religion, which really put a lot of people off and within 10 minutes people started leaving the church, us included!
Christmas day we woke up nice and early and made our way into the lounge to open our pressies on our own for the first time ever. Even though it was a little weird, it was nice to just be the both of us. Dressed in shorts and Santa hats we opened our presents for a few hours while sipping bucks fizz and eating ‘Eggy Bread’ (James is amazing at cooking this). After all the presents, including a PSP for James (woohoo) and high heels for Kim had been opened, James started preparing the Christmas dinner. Instead of getting up at 5am and putting the turkey in the oven, James was elbow deep in prawn juice preparing the tasty prawns for the BBQ. Along with the garlic-honey prawns, James was preparing Sword fish, salmon fillets and kangaroo.
We tried to fully embrace the Ozzy Christmas by doing a festive BBQ
Phished
someones had too much goon! hahah instead of the traditional Christmas dinner with turkey and veg, which we planned to do on Boxing Day.
Jim and Helen came over armed with enough goon (wine) to sink the Titanic, and we all enjoyed the weather, food and festivities while listening to John Denver Xmas special on the trusty Ipod.
After an amazing feast we rocked down to the beach with surf boards in hand to catch some Christmas surf. When we got down there we were quite surprised at the number of people, surfing and doing their own BBQ on the beach. After unsuccessfully trying to surf (due to the large amount of booze we had consumed) we headed back home and played board games and passed out, as you do.
Boxing Day we woke up and headed straight to Sally and Simon’s house. While they were back in the UK they said we could go over and cooked a traditional Christmas dinner if we promised not to burn down the joint.
A little hung-over from the day before we spent the morning preparing the veg (parsnips, carrots, mushrooms, sweetcorn, spuds, broccoli), pigs in blankets, Yorkshire puddings and of course the huge bird. Surprisingly it turned
out really well and we were quite proud of ourselves considering it was our first time. Following the feast we played on the Wii and rocked out on Guitar Hero, which Kim seems to be a natural at!
New Years Eve we headed down to a view point called Cremorne Point so that we could get a good view of the fireworks over the Sydney Bridge. We were advised to get down there early as it gets very very busy, and we were luckily enough to get a space* reserved for us so we didn’t have to get down there too early.
We rocked down about 5pm and were amazed to see how many people were already down there and it was obvious that people had camped out the night before as it looked like a scene from Glastonbury with tents and beer everywhere!
When we enquired with our friend where our reserved spot was he point to a 3 by 3 foot rock no further than a foot away from the cliff edge. To say we were a little nevery was an understatement, but we put our worries behind us and plonked ourselves on our rock.
For the
next 6 hours we consumed 8 litres of wine (between the four of us) while watching an outstanding sunset, and trying not to drunkenly stumble into the water.
Once it got dark we watched the thousands of brightly coloured boats sailing up towards the Harbour Bridge in the boat parade. And as midnight got closer we were relived to see the fireworks starting over the bridge as we were pretty tired and drunk by now.
The fireworks were very impressive (But not as good as the 4th July ones we saw in NY) and lasted well over half an hour. Once they were over, we left our rock and joined the hordes of people back to the bus stop so we could continue the party back in Manly. Upon arriving home we found Ed (our housemate) wandering the streets, smashed of his head so we roped him back into the flat and partied hard until 5am!
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ali
non-member comment
Wow, looks like you are having great time
James Good to see that both of you are enjoying yourselves immensely. Looking forward to the next instalment of adventures and photos. Pity, Hull wont be in the PL by that time!!!