Adventures with animals

So after the visit of the big black dog it was inevitably gonna take some time to get back to 100% but i feel like I'm heading in the right direction, all be it slowly. I have however with the help of my glamorous assistant been out and about a few times.

The first of our outings was to "International Passport day" at Royal Randwick Racecourse... for whatever reason if you take any international passport to the races here on boxing day you get free entry! ... I say free, the fact that i am travelling with what can only be described as the most casual of all clothes means that i did have to spend $70 (£42) on a pair of shoes and a shirt to make me presentable enough to get in.

It was a decent day, nice to meet one of Rachel's close friends, Alesha, and have a bit of a flutter, although apparently I'm better at Canadian betting than Australian as i didn't pick a winner all day. We did manage to sink 3 bottles of champagne and get pretty darn sunburnt despite applying some factor 35 before we went out. After the races we headed to Coggee which is a beech suburb of Sydney which seemed pretty cool but pretty busy. In the event we only ended up having 1 beer and then went for a bit of Indian food before heading home.

I was still suffering with jet lag by the 27th and woke up at 2am so we had another pretty quiet day, we went for a quiet lunch in newtown ( a funky Soho esq suburb of Sydney) of tapas and sangria before heading back via the pub and i managed to stay awake until 10pm! ooh get me! but the resulting sleep appears to have got me back on track.

Yesterday was the day we did something I had really been looking forward to and the second of the animal related activities... A trip to Sydney aquarium, I had really good memories of the aquarium from the last time i was here 10/11 years ago and was excited to see what had changed and show rachel. Interestingly the aquarium I remember from all that time ago is still the aquarium now... it would appear that no one has cleaned, painted or changed anything at all except throwing extra animals into the already crowded tanks. And speaking of crowded... I appreciate its the summer holidays over here but, my god!! to say the place was rammed would be like saying the pope is a little bit religious, we couldn't move more than a few steps without walking into, getting walked into or having our ear drums burst by the next little bundle of over heated, over excited , sugar fuelled holiday loving kid... the joys!

The only redeeming feature was the penguins, being a favourite of mine, one of Rachel's favourite and an area that was marginally less rammed (because we opted not to wait the extra 25 minutes for what looked like a 3 minute dingy ride around said penguin enclosure) we did have a few smiles (especially when one took a huge bird dump in front of another that swam straight through it... god we're mature) and relaxed a little bit. We managed to salvage the day somewhat by making a swift exit to Angus (steak house) and grabbing a steak sandwich next to darling harbour before heading back to chat, chill out and watch some funny TV.

that's about it for now, but for fans of New Years Eve, I have a bit of exciting news, myself and rach have splashed out on some great tickets for the fireworks and i will be ticking the Sydney harbour new years fireworks off my bucket list after about 17 years!

extra few photos here (nothing too exciting): https://goo.gl/photos/b8iAMymo5MYSSRfd8Read more