SYDNEY, Australia

After a restless overnighter on countylink's wonderful train system, we arrived back into Sydney for a week to explore the area! We stayed with my friend Shell from camp in a suburban area called Lakemba, which has a huge Lebanese influence. Trust me, Australia is the last place I expected to see a woman dressed in robes with a veil only revealing her eyes, but I did.

We spent most of the week seeing the touristy, "hey I'm in Sydney" sites. One of my favorite things we did was tour the Sydney Opera House (which is amazing), and walk across the Sydney Harbor Bridge, which was also amazing (I love walking across bridges). My camera had a long, hard day. One of the funniest moment was during lunch when Tara had a seagull divebomb and steal a piece of chicken from her sandwich, when only moments later my friend Shell had her ENTIRE PANINI lifted out of her hands by a swarm of seagulls. The entire time I was sitting in the middle laughing at them, when all of a sudden a seagull decided to leave me a nice little present and poop on my shoulder. What a wonderful souvenir.

From Sydney, we also took the train into the Blue Mountains, which is incredible (I'm branching out from the word amazing here). There are 3 huge rock pillars called the 3 Sisters which have an aboriginal story behind them which you can look up yourself if you are interested. Tara and I spent a night up there and walked to the 3 sisters lookout to see the sunrise. I felt more peaceful than I had in yonks.

We also celebrated my 22nd birthday in Sydney. We went to the world famous Bondi Beach, which surprised me when we walked in cuz the water was colder than Lake Superior in June. Yikes. But, the air temp was fairly nice (about 85-90), which made the water bearable. I was only sad that I didn't have a boogie board! The waves were awesome! For dinner, we went out to a place called Pancakes on the Rocks where I had Banana Pancakes (no Jack Johnson though, sad), and a Banana Daiquiri (can you tell that I like bananas), and it was great. We finished off the evening by walking around the harbor and taking lots of pictures of the opera house and harbor bridge at night. What could be better?

I must say, that as cool as it was to see the opera house and the harbor bridge and ride the ferries, Sydney was definitely my least favorite place in Australia. Besides the icons, its just like any other city - big, overcrowded, and smelly - and I'm not a city girl. Everything we did in Sydney was fun and incredible, but I wasn't hesitant to move on from the chaos.