Dragon boats, opera, and cockatoos (Study Abroad Bloggers)

Wow, today was busy! I ended up meeting up with a few friends this morning and we spent the day exploring Sydney. In the morning we met at Victoria Park where the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival is taking place. This morning there was some sort of dog show going on. We then walked to Darlington Harbor where they are celebrating the Chinese New Year. We watched a few dragon boat races where the rowers were all breast cancer survivors. Our next stop was the Maritime Museum. By this point, we were pretty hungry so we started heading away from the tourist area looking for something cheap.

That's something about Australia, everything is really expensive. I thought that I was really lucking out by going to Australia instead of Europe, but they are apparently paid really well here. Someone with a random minimum wage-ish job will get paid about $18 an hour. I realize that some of the sticker shock with food is because you don't tip in Australia and because tax is already factored into the price, but still.

After lunch we headed to Circular Quay which is another touristy area where ferries and cruise ships dock. A little further on were views of the Harbor Bridge and the opera house. The opera house isn't as white as I expected. As I got closer I saw that the roof is covered in small tiles that alternate between a white and a cream color forming a sort of zig-zag pattern.

The Royal Botanical Gardens are right next door to the opera house, so we spent a few hours walking through the gardens and relaxing by the ponds. There were lots of really cool birds like cockatoos and ibises all over the place. And there were bats ... big bats. I saw one last night while walking through campus, but couldn't decide if it was a bat or a hawk. The trees in a few areas of the gardens were full of hundreds of HUGE bats hanging upside down, and making lots of noise.

One of the Arcadia staff members had told us about a short film festival that would be held in a park next to the botanical gardens. The festival, Trop Fest, is the largest short film festival in the world. The films were really good, but we were only able to stay for six or seven of them because it started to rain.

We went to a Turkish place for dinner, which turned out to be pretty good. I have never been around any ethnic food outside of Chinese and Mexican, so trying all the new types of food is going to be a big thing for me. The city and particularly the area around the school is full of ethnic restaurants. Thai, Malaysian, African, Lebanese, Scandanavian, they have it all!

So there you have it. In my first full day in Sydney I went to three festivals, a museum, visited all of the iconic Sydney landmarks, and tried some new food. I'm feeling pretty darn accomplished. I was surprised how close everything was. Yes, we were walking all day, but maps of the main part of Sydney make it seem much larger than it actually is.

Tomorrow we begin the international student orientation at the university, so hopefully I'll learn a lot. I'm still in the dark about the Internet policy and classes and, you know, all of the important things. Apparently I only get 6MB per day of Internet, and after that I have to pay per MB. Hummm ... so much for Skyping with my family and uploading lots of pictures.