Sydney

What a long day of travel. We left Honolulu at 8:30 Thursday morning and got to Sydney, with a stop in Auckland at 9:00 on Friday night. Very strange thing to cross the International Dateline. We will gain a day on our way back in a month.
We have great accommodation through airbnb in a part of Sydney called Potts Point. There was an organic market just down the street today and we are fairly close to King's Cross, the bar and red light district. No walking in your sleep here or you might get more than you bargained for. It is nice to have an apartment with cooking facilities and a living room. We took the Hop-on-hop-off bus tour today around Sydney. It is a very interesting city. A lot of sleek, modern skyscrapers that Dave says remind him of Shanghai. They have interesting lines, curves, not just tall boxes. They have done a good job of preserving old buildings, and repurposing them, especially on the waterfront.
We made a stop at the iconic Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. The opera house is probably the most recognized building in the world and it is very impressive!! Much bigger than we were expecting. It seems that many of the pictures you see are taken from the bridge. You need to get a distance away to see it's magnificence. We did NOT climb the bridge. Getting a quarter of the way up and having to be talked (or carried) down did not appeal to me.
The attached pictures are the Opera House from the land side, the bridge with Dave pretending to be Fred Astaire in Dancing in the Rain, a giant tree in the park nearby called a Mountain Fig tree and an apartment building that has green plants growing all over it.Read more