October 7 - Blaise

Blaise Says . . .

Day 2, Finally Down Under:

We finally made it, it seems almost surreal that you can be around the world in under a few days, and yet I’m writing this a 2:45am while The Big Bang rerun is on, sorry they don’t have a FiOS Guide that tells you what episode it is, but it is prior to Leonard and Penny hooking up so it must be Season 2 of 3 for those that watch it regularly.  On to the day…

We arrived at 7am this morning, the flight was quite nice and I slept on and off through approximately 50% of the flight, window seats are always better than aisles and with only the window/aisle setup in Premium Economy it’s a viable mode of transportation.  I got up twice to use the restroom and saw those poor folks sitting in coach and my heart went out to them, they looked miserable and I thought why put yourself through that?  Anyway…

We hit customs at 7:15 and we were out to the shuttle area by 7:24, they are efficient but don’t forget to get your visa online before you go otherwise I suspect things will go very differently.  The shuttle ride was painfully slow as we had to drive through rush hour but the hotel definitely made up for the suffrage.  We dropped off the luggage and headed for “The Bridge”!!  The bridge is exactly one block from the hotel and we found ourselves heading up the stairs for the pedestrian walk for breakfast.  It was fantastic, it is definitely a sight to behold, the Opera House 1500 yards from the bridge with an absolutely perfect visual for the photo of a lifetime, we took a dozen or so, I’m sure Ami will upload a few.
 
Unfortunately finding the restaurant wasn’t nearly as easy to find as the bridge, we have a book that told us to eat at a place called Ripples, on the North side with a view of the bridge, the problem was the map in the book ended right where they had told us we needed to be, so we had to ask the grocery store attendant for directions after being lost for an hour; the Aussies’ are fantastic, the guy say “sure mate, let me get it on the Google”, I wanted to laugh but it was pretty quaint I thought.  We were 500 feet from the place all the while, what did we do before Google Maps?   But it was definitely worth the hunt, it was fantastic and it fronts the Olympic public pool just out back, now if you’re going to swim at a public pool one with a view of the Sydney Bridge certainly does sound enticing in principle.  By the time we returned to the hotel we able to check in early and grab some much needed sleep before we went out exploring for dinner.  We intended to go to the Sydney Café but it was determined that we weren’t dressed appropriately, we found a nice fish restaurant that quickly let us know that without a reservation that we weren’t going to eat there, I thought about telling the host that we didn’t know they existed 5 minutes before we discovered them on our walkabout, how could we possibly be expected to make a reservation, I let it go… We ended up in the bar next door that had a restaurant in the back where you ordered your first meal in Australia via a short order cook, Ami had the fish basket and I had an amazing burger, 40 bucks, bring lots of cash!!!  We walk back and went back to bed, it might have a been a bit early but the upside is that caught up on my sleep, on to the Sydney Opera House tour and hit the cruise ship tomorrow, we head out at 6p, can’t wait, more tomorrow…