Walking and touring

The plan for today was to wake up early and go on a free walking tour of the city at 10am and then visit the museum afterwards. We did wake you early with our alarms and then proceeded to both fall back asleep for over another hour so the morning tour was out the window. I remembered however seeing a tour advertised on our map and this started at 2pm so that was the new aim. We had our usual poached eggs on toast and got ready to face the world. It's about a 30 minute walk to the harbour from our hostel so we headed off taking in the sights of the cities architecture on this route as we went. We popped into H&M in search of winter coats. No winter style coats existed and the thin jacket they had they wanted £50 for! H&M is definitely not as cheap as the UK. We were lucky though and got thermal gloves reduced to £1.80 a pair and a hat for me reduced to £3 so that was a happy coincidence. We finally reached the harbour and were greated by the most impressive view of the opera house, harbour bridge and banking district. We sat down to have some food and by the time we'd done that we realised we didn't really have to to visit the museum before the tour started. Instead we sat on the banks looking out at the view while a musician played beautiful instrumental pieces on his guitar. We met with the tour leader Gino at 2pm and initially we were the only ones there but thankfully within a few minutes we became a group 9. Our tour guide was full of so much knowledge of the city and didn't shy away from its dark history. We realised we barely know anything about this country or city and how it was formed. The English chose to build Sydney to house it's prisoners but this basically meant taking the land and resources from the aboriginal people who already lived there. Within 6 months the water supply was undrinkable and half the population of the native people had died from the introduction of disease. We were shocked to learn that it was only in the 70's that aboriginal people were granted the same rights as settling Australians. We were even more shocked to learn that not so long ago children were being captured from the native families and forced to learn English ways and customs and then have children with white people to essentially breed the native people out of existence. It's horrific to hear about but we were so pleased he told it how it was and not a glossed over happier story. How they viewed aboriginal people is shown clearly in a statue we saw. It shows the first goveneror of the settlement high up on the statue and beneath him are 4 gods and then at the very bottom of the monuments unnamed and in saddening poses are the aboriginals. It hammered home how they viewed these people. The tour ended in the harbour again as the sun was setting so we got lovely views of the opera house and once we had tipped Gino and parted ways we walked around to view the Harbour Bridge in the sunset light too. After exploring the area more and walking around we stopped at the Guylian resturant for a hot chocolate and a cake. I've never seen a resturant before and they are my favourite chocolates so we just had to stop by. Our day was completed with Nick cooking tea while I showered, loving the fact that this hostel loans our hair dryers. Not the day we planned, as usual in our case, but a great day exploring the history of Sydney.Weiterlesen