Special

It has been all rainy and not warm today so to make up for it I just made a Special chocolate cake! Yayyyy. Special = gluten free in my exciting world. The cake actually sunk right down in the middle so there's actually a lake of chocolate goo in it! Cannot wait. We're waiting for Ruth and Lili to get back from dropping a friend off at Palm Beach (someone they know rents there - must make friends) til we can eat dinner which means we can then eat the cake.

Yesterday when we got on the bus back from the city, I realised the trio in front were from the UK (woman with streaky dyed blonde hair, 50s, son with ginger hair, 20s, overweight girl, also 20s). And I thought wow more Poms, we're everywhere. Don't blame us. And I settled down to watch Sydney go by, but you know when you're trying to read or whatever and there's someone talking or spiky music with stupid words in, and you try not to but the words just hook your ear? I couldn't concentrate because the woman and the son were having this loud English argument about how long it takes to get from Bristol to Cardiff. On and on, and on, like, if it's actually important to you today in Australia, couldn't you just agree to disagree and it could all just take 10 seconds? Then they moved onto, I'm not sure what the point of it was, they just started listing roads, I don't know, that were good or something.
'Yeah there's the M4. And the M32.
'A3. M25.'
'The M5.'
What the hell?! We're about to go over the Harbour Bridge! Isn't that kind of interesting? British road names?! Really?!
FINALLY they got off the fun game of naming fascinating strips of tarmac and moved onto whether of not the mum had given him a playstation for his birthday one year in the past, or whether he had payed for it himself. Or maybe it was his dad that bought it for him. 'Oh my godd Murm, oi toatlee peed for it moiself!! Nooo! Ohh my godd Murm seerislee, you know nothing!' To help them get to the truth they went through what he got for his birthday every other year of his blessed existence, then explaining how an Xbox is different from a playstation (plee-stashuuun)....OHMYGOD SHUT UP!!! We are in SYDNEY LOOK LOOK! Stop ruining my journey with your boring lives!

I have asked a few people but somehow the Aussie's don't seem to mind the Poms, which I'm surprised about, as we do seem to be constantly invading the country and then sticking together in groups.

Very surprised. I didn't like us much on the bus.

Aquarium

Today Zappa and I went to the aquarium in Darling Harbour. It was good, if full of many many different groups of primary school children in their uniforms and hats. I had no idea children were so loud! Why are they so loud?

Here are some pictures of underwater critters, which aren't very good but they're of THINGS.

Massive Japanese spider crab!

Dugong! The Australian name for manatee. It was a bit scratched, don't know whether that's normal.

White tip shark

The rest of the Sydney Common Octopus

The weather has been miserable today, so weird after yesterday's heat. This is the view from the window at the moment:

It's quite nice being curled up indoors with a cup of tea.

A Map, Whales, North Head and my first trip to the city

Firstly I am a visual aid kind of a person and I would be frustrated not knowing where things were in relation to each other. So here is a map with currently important landmarks on it.

North Head

Yesterday Zappa went off to help a friend called Rob with the doing-up of his boat (apparently he's been doing it 7 years but the launch date should be in about 6 weeks). On the way (to Rose Bay, see ye mappe), on the ferry, he saw a whale!!! I am so jealous. I looked up Whales at Manly Beach and there was a little site about them, (http://members.ozemail.com.au/~russo/whales/whales.html to credit the pictures to them, what a responsible blogger I am), and the picture sequence of this seemingly attention-seeking whale made me laugh. Like so:

Alex shows his tail

Alex shows off to a ferry

Alex just gets bloody obnoxious about it

 I might have changed the last one. But that's how I read them and it made me laugh.

So. I was on my own for a day, and after lazing around reading a book and cleaning out Jebediah the fish, I thought I should probably do something interesting, so Woody and I went to North Head, a nature reserve type thing with nice views. A guy gave me his parking ticket as he left saving me a sweet $8, and we set off, Woody catching the scent of all sorts of sporting-smelling creatures and getting very excited. Including this bizarrely black rabbit:

 Woody chomping at the bit after seeing said rabbit

 

The views were indeed rather gorgeous:

 

We had a look at different views for a while, then decided we'd had enough and started back. Except I couldn't remember the way back and got sort of lost in the bush. I mean it wasn't proper jungle but I think it definitely counted as bush. I walked through an unmanned spider's web and Woody very nearly ate a huge black specimen of Sydney's fiercely protected water dragons - this picture I took the first time at the Bower but just to illustrate:

That would have been slightly bad... Eventually we made our way back to Dingo and managed to give the all-day ticket to another nice bloke. Yayy. I'm a little concerned cos the ticket inspector guy saw me do it, wrote it down and then went and called someone...hope it's not illegal...

My First Trip to the CITY

Today we went into Sydney Proper on the ferry!

 We took the train to Hyde Park (I think over half the road and place names in Sydney are borrowed from London) to see a bit of Art and About, an annual event in Sydney where art is taken outdoors:
"The idea was to transform our city into a canvas, to create a living gallery on our streets, with work that would make Sydneysiders stop, think, laugh or smile…." (http://www.artandabout.com.au/)

Then we had a brief wander about before settling down to read in the shade of a tree in the park.

After that we started off to find a vegetarian cafe where we'd read there was some live music, couldn't find it, walked for miles, I started collapsing, so we dragged me into a nice bistro type thing and I had the BEST burger and 2 whole cokes and I felt explodingly happy and decided it was the best day EVER. God knows how I'm going to feel tomorrow but I survived and was full of glee.

 We've got a week's ticket for everything - ferries, trains and buses. So we'll hopefully venture in a few more times this week. Now it's time for the RUGBY FINAL! (I've gotten into it). Can't wait - I really like watching the French play cos they're all zip-zip-zip WOO (can't believe Tonga beat them - I wouldn't have thought sheer size would matter that much at a world cup level but hush ma mouth!). And the All-Blacks are just legendary. Should be a good game.