Sydney 1

I woke up around 5, and we were both up by 6:30. Once again we started our day prolonging our wordle and duolingo streaks, then headed down for the breakfast buffet. There is some difference between the Hampton Inn breakfast buffet and the one here at the Four Seasons Hotel. Full English breakfast, plus pancakes. Charcuterie. Greeen salad. Oatmeal, muesli, toppings. Pastries. Fresh fruit and a spectacular strawberry smoothie. All absolutely delicious. Just wow. During and after our delicious breakfast my head and stomach had that same woke up early feeling I had on Saturday when we got up at 3:25, but that was the only jet-laggy thing we had going on.

After breakfast we walked past the harbor to the Royal Botanic Gardens, passing the Carnival Splendor which is docked here and looks from our hotel like another large building. It’s only a couple of blocks from here to there, but we overshot and ended up at the Sydney Opera House which looks exactly like it does in the pictures. It turns out that there’s an entrance to the botanic garden there, so we spent about two hours wandering around it. I think both of us would call the wild cockatoos a highlight, but really the whole morning there was lovely – perfect weather, lots and lots to see. When we were in California in February we’d gone to the LA county arboretum where they have an Australia section, but this is even better. We couldn’t find the bottle tree, which we saw in CA and I’d hoped to see here.

By this time we were getting hungry. Our hotel is located at the end of the rocks district, which was the first part of Sydney to be established. I’d seen ads for pub crawls there, so we headed over to find a pub. We found one (Endeavour Taprooms) and were very pleased with it – it was just a block off the main drag but didn’t feel touristy, and the food and beer were exactly what we’d hoped for. It felt good to sit down for a while! They had nice wifi once you figure out how to spell Endeavour for the password. I thought it was nice wifi, anyway, but Dave couldn’t connect to it.

After lunch we walked around the district some more, including a short visit to the small museum. It’s very young history here. They had a temporary exhibit about convicts and dancing which was full of useful factoids, including a woman who was arrested for dancing to exuberantly and another whose cause of death after a wedding was listed as excessive dancing. I may have dodged a bullet in November!

Back to our hotel. We talked to the concierge and he got us a dinner reservation for tonight, but not until 8:30. Dinner on our upcoming cruise will be at a similar time, so as long as we’re getting used to meals on this new timezone we may as well adjust that too. Next up was a walk the other way down George Street to the Big W, which turned out to be a Woolworth’s. Dave needed toothpaste and I’d forgotten to bring stockings, which are called tights here. Sydney is quite a city and the walk through this shopping district was fun. After we got back to the hotel I walked back over to the wharf to revisit a hat (end result: no hat) while Dave hung out at the hotel. Once I got back I went to the gyn (nobody knows how to turn off the awful music) and did my Pilates, and then it was blogging time while outside the sun set. There’s a building outside our window that has all the same color shades and it looks like it’s gold during the day, but it’s much less magical at night.

Dinner was at 6Head. Google was a little unclear on where it was and seemed to take us to a very depressing hotel restaurant, so when we discovered it was actually the inviting looking place nearby we were very happy. The food was good to very good, not terribly memorable. One moment that was memorable was when they brought my appetizer, the octopus roll. I hadn’t really looked at the description, figuring it was some sort of sushi-like preparation, and here came octopus on a hotdog roll, you know, an octopus roll. It was very tasty and also made us laugh. The best thing about the restaurant was its location; sitting outside we had a view of the harbor bridge in one direction and the opera house in the other. Service was slow, so we had a late bedtime.