The Land Down Under

When I was booking the trip and figuring out the flights, it occurred to me that we were going to be much closer to Australia than usual (yet still an 8-hour flight away), and so I did some searching and found really cheap flights to and from Sydney! Unsure of when we will be down this way again I booked the tickets, hoping to keep it a secret from Lain until we were in Asia. Unfortunately, Lain found out that day when she got an email confirming her e-visa. Didn't think that one through too well!

Anyways, after a long day of travel, we finally got to our hotel by about 11pm, after taking a ferry from Sydney to Manly. When I googled Sydney to Manly I saw it was a 43-minute walk, perfect... Apart from the 43 minutes mostly being on a ferry! Strictly walking was about 3 hours or something. Ah well, can't be all that bad commuting on a ferry through the Sydney harbor. And what was cool was that it went right between the harbor bridge and the opera house!

We knew that it was going to be winter in Sydney, but the first day we were there was colder than we were expecting! We didn't get up until late as we were jetlagged and spent most of the night booking flights on a whim (Dublin, back to Budapest, Alastair to Svalbard!), so we didn't do a ton that day. We went shopping for a jacket each, which was much appreciated. We bought Emre some dinosaur candies, which made an appearance later on when he puked and pooped his guts out back at the hotel - poor kid!

Given Emre's tricky night, we decided to take it really easy the second day. We stayed in Manly, which was really nice. We walked up and down the beach, walking around the rocks and swimming pool at the end of the beach, and then went back to the hotel to chill and watch movies. So glad we always travel with the Chromecast now, real game changer!

The next day, we headed down to Bondi Beach for the Bondi to Bronte walk. While not hot, the weather was amazing, blue skies and really cool waves. We'd never seen such big waves in our lives! We played together at the beach and then let Emre play at a little park for a while. 

Our last day was spent wandering around Sydney before heading over to the airport. We went to Darling Harbor, and the weather was much warmer than the days before. We ended up in shorts and t-shirt, and while we were playing by the water, some fishermen came up on their boat and invited Emre to come and see the fish they were using as bait. Emre ended up catching them in a little net and then even held one or two! It was cool to see him so confident, grabbing the fish and laughing with delight!

At the airport, we had a little accident with Emre on a suitcase. We let him sit on the top of one of our suitcase, and he fell off and hit his face on the airport floor! Won't be doing that again. Luckily, he didn't have any damage to his teeth, but his lip was cut pretty bad, enough that he was bleeding quite a lot. Once again, poor kid!

We came to the conclusion that it would be nice to live in Sydney. It maybe hasn't been the most adventurous or exciting place we've ever been, but we liked it a lot. Could see ourselves posting up there for a while.