Sumptuous Sydney!

Sydney is the perfect city - beautiful people and architecture, balmy temps, clean, everyone is nice (several people saw us looking at our maps and stopped to help us), so much to see, and big smelly bats in the trees...

Scott says that these flying foxes will pee on you if you "piss" them off. All the bushes they roost in stink!

Such a racket! Squawking and squabbling constantly.

 In Cairns, these guys only came out at night, but not in Sydney. They live in the Botanical Gardens across from the Opera House and yak at each other all day.

Scott pointing to the AMP building where my lovely friend, Emily, works. We met her there at the end of the day for kangaroo pizza.

Ancient wave-eroded rock overhangs surrounding Sydney harbour.

Trying in vain to imitate all the model look-alikes who walk this city.

Pointedly not trying to look like a model at all...

There are 1,057,000 shiny Swedish tiles were used to build the opera house - we didn't have time to count them all. Gorgeous!

 

Around every corner, a new dazzling image

 

See the tiny people walking across the arch - it only cost them about $400 each. We opted to walk across the main section for free :)

Ben! "Can't sleep, clowns will eat me!" Just kidding :) 

Very busy harbour! Later on a huge town-sized cruise ship docked and the folks coming off stopped us to tell us how horrible their cruise was. They were supposed to stop at 9 ports of call, but only stopped once. There were other horror stories that I will leave out...

The fifth longest spanning-arch bridge in the world. We walked across it - a high point of the day.

Historic steps near Circular Quay

 

Street performers - new agey didgeredoo stuff. I liked it!

 

Reflections in the financial district high rises

 

Lunchtime! I've never seen so many oxford cloth shirts in one place.

 

I asked Emily why there were no homeless folks or vagrants here. She said they are all taken care of and have places to stay and food to eat. That said, we did go through one sketchy section of town where one fellow yelled out the window, "Hey! How's your bush?!" I don't think he was talking about our former president. 

  

Oh my goodness, the best seafood platter in my whole life!

  

Salvadore Squidly

  

Seaweed salad - tasted like little live eels

 

One of the many original govt buildings

 

Be sure and click to enlarge this pic, and scroll. This only gets you to lunchtime of our glorious day in the city! I had no idea this city was so wonderful. We've been loving every minute of it, but we have to leave for Hawaii tomorrow. Should have planned more time here! Anyway, we'll update the blog with the rest of what we did here soon....