Belated happy new year...

... from Melbourne!
What a poor job I'm doing at updating my blog(s)! Really... It's not for lack of trying though -where we are staying in Melbourne right now (my dad's relatives' house) does not have an Internet connection. Gasp! You heard it, no Internet here, nada (except an unexpected wireless network which came out of nowhere, and allows me to write right now).

Anyhow, enough with the excuses. Hope you all had a jolly good New Years Eve --Juliette and I sure did, as we watched the fireworks right in the middle of Sydney Harbour. Fantastic memories, and more on that later on, with pictures and all, once I'll have a proper connection! I promise we'll tell all about our Amazing Adventures in Australia (or not so amazing, really) when we'll be back in New Zealand. Juliette is flying out on the 20th and myself on the 29th.

In any case, see you then and hope you all had a fantastic start of the year!

Quick message...

Sorry we haven't posted much lately -access to the Internet has been pretty restricted since we're staying in a backpackers. My laptop can't even connect to a network!
Anyway, wishing to you all a belated Merry Christmas, we hope it was full of cheer and good food and presents. As for us, even though we were far away from our families, we still managed to have a good time...

But more on that later, once I'll be properly connected to the Web! Hope you're all having happy holidays!

In Sydney, cont'd

It's a bit hard to write in two blogs at the same time -I started writing about our time in Sydney on my own blog (see the post here), but I've decided to continue posting here because 1- it'd be a bit rude to Juliette; 2- I mostly keep my blog to ramble on about my fandoms so my personal life doesn't really belong there. Anyhow! Here we are, then, in Australia. By the way, I plan to update both blogs way more than I usually did, but I don't really know if it'll hold...

In any case, we're in Sydneeeeey, Australia's pride and glory, the largest city (in terms of population), the capital of New South Wales, Finding Nemo's setting (heh)... It's been all good so far -terrifying, impressive, warm and FULL OF PEOPLE. Duh! You'd believe that Australia, being this huge scary territory, would have less people than that. But Sydney is just massive, as in Paris massive. Crazy... Because we've been in New Zealand all that time, we're just not used to big cities anymore.

So, that post on my blog was our first day in Sydney -this is a summary of the second one (in pictures!)
Oh, and as I've said many times, I'm the shittiest photographer you can ever think of, so the pics are all wobbly and crap. I apologise for the poor angles really...

The Archibald Fountain


St Mary's Cathedral

We actually went inside the cathedral. It was quite, well, impressive. Can't think of any other adjective to describe these... After that, we went for a walk in the Royal Botanic Gardens, which is right by the city centre and yet, very peaceful and quiet.

The CBD view from the Gardens (what a contrast)


A glass pyramid in the Gardens which was oddly familiar, and which featured an... interesting message across


Flowers (what a boring caption :p)


Bats on a tree, which was downright scary, and they were noisy as hell! It was fun anyway...

Walking alongside the Gardens, we ended up on the harbour, by far Sydney's liveliest and most tourist-y district.

The Opera House and Harbour Bridge: not at all instantly recognisable

After that, we went to run some Christmas errands: it's all around us indeed, even though temperature can hit the 25°C mark. It's really odd being here around that time of the year, because the weather is of course quite un-Christmassy.

Today, our third day in the city, we took the ferry (which is a form of public transport here, just as any other bus or train -can you believe that?) to Manly Beach.

View of the city from the ferry



Views alongside the scenic walkway

T'was quite amazing -really nice to just walk around and taking it easy. We simply could not believe some people were fortunate enough to own houses right by that kind of scenery! But they do, those lucky bastards.

Well, that's it for now :) More updates later, I'm sure!