Sunday 05 July 2009

Day 4? No, wait, Day 5. No…okay, I give up. No more naming my days. (I’ve got about 361 left anyway…this would get tedious).

Frank and Alice are fantastic. They picked me (and my twelve gazillion suitcases, none of which, I might add, contained the adapters/converters I so painstakingly selected before departing) up from the airport, let me drop my stuff off at their cute little house in Oyster Bay, and instead of putting me directly to bed as my poor body wanted (which was a smart move on their part), they took me on a
whirlwind tour of Sydney. We ate lunch at the famous Doyle's fish and chips! It was good if, you know, you like fish and chips. Which I don't. But don't tell them that. We sat on a blanket on the beach and had a picnic. I took about a zillion videos with my little camera (thanks Aunt Laila and Uncle Rudy!), including a flock of lorikeets, a crow that made noises like a dying man, a hundred different angles of the Harbour Bridge (we actually drove over it!!!! For the supremely affordable cost of A4$!) I spent ten minutes zoomed in on two little flecks on the ocean which were whales' tails slapping the water, and then I realized I had the camera turned off. O well as Yossarian would say. What the hell. Watch the videos! (And bear in mind that I was rather jetlagged when I took them.)

Sydney deserves a little explanation, by the way. It’s HUGE. “The City” is the part you always see on television, with the opera house, Harbour, Luna Park, etc. But the whole area actually consists of a thousand thousand suburbs. Oyster Bay, for example, is a forty-minute drive from The City, but still part of Sydney. Some suburbs are expensive, like the ones where the stars like Hugh and Nicole and Mel and Russell live—Bondi (the famous beach), Vaucluse, Double Bay. Others are more like, ummm, Manchester. I think Maroubra is New London. You get the idea.