Name your price

I had Skyped my mom for my birthday, but it wasn’t clear and apparently we looked like aliens, so I decided to give it another go. It was much better this time and the resolution was pretty clear! We caught up on a lot of things, such as how it has been here, our trips that we plan on going on, and me trying to get her Kitchen Aid. Well, the last one didn’t quite work out, but I thought I may as well give it a try ;) It was nice to get to talk to her again since it had been a while since we had Skyped, let alone Facebook message, so getting to talk to her was more than enjoyable! Although we could have talked about much more, it was getting late back home and she had to get up bright and early for work so we decided it would be best if we said our goodbyes. We headed off to the campus so Lauren could do more work on her project and I wanted to look up some more recipes. I had originally thought about getting up early to go ahead and get my class out of the way but sleep got the best of me. Instead we hung out at the library until I had my last class of the semester. Really it wasn’t even a class but an exam review instead. We also watched a video on Cricket which somehow related to PK because there is a version of Wriggles gum here called PK which is rather sticky. So whenever a player would catch the ball the fans would yell out PK because he caught it, meaning he had sticky hands. I know, it’s a long stretch connection but we all got a pack of PK gum out of it so I wasn’t complaining. I brought some back for Lauren to try as well since she’s been missing her chewing gum. They had a slight minty or cinnamon taste which was different than the Wriggles back home. We rushed back to make dinner since we were both starving and tuna melts were on the menu. We haven’t had tuna in a while and its one of my favorite foods so the sandwiches were beyond delicious. Like usual we added extra ingredients to the mix like green peppers, green onions, mayo and pepper to make our own version of tuna melts. We got caught watching a little bit of the evening news while Lauren surfed the internet. After about an hour of watching some very interesting shows like this mystery date one where the girl picks three blind dates based off their chosen menu, then they have to cook for her and she picks the best man out of the three to go on the ultimate dinner date with her, we decided it was time to get out. We grabbed our warm clothes and took off in the direction of the fish markets since there’s a water front right behind it. We got as far as the water and decided it was enough for the night since it was already late and rather cold. We escaped back into the warmth for the night.

The seats were like memory foam!

We had originally planned to go to church on Saturday evening, but with the weather looking iffy and our night full of plans we weren’t able to make it. So instead of being complete bums and waiting until the noon mass we got up early to go to the 9:30 AM mass. Right when we stepped outside we realized we should have just gone the night before because it was pouring! We have never seen rain like this in Sydney before, and by the time we had walked to church our clothes were soaked. Riley keeps getting on me about my umbrella since he thinks it should be thrown away, but that little red thing has upheld some strong winds and heavy downpours now! This was nothing compared to the even heavier downpour that we could see going on through the glass windows of the church. We only hoped that it would stop before mass was over but that wasn’t the case. We were stuck with the debate to either run back in the rain or just hang around and wait it out. We decided on the latter since the markets are right near the church. We wandered around for a while but decided it wasn’t worth it to wait on the rain any longer; our clothes were already drenched and it was rather chilly outside so we just thought it’d be better to get back and get in some warm clothes! It was a bit of a lazy Sunday since we didn’t have much on our agenda except that Riley was going to see the second Star Trek movie with Neill. During trivia last week Neill had been joking with his friend saying he wouldn’t go see the Star Trek movie with him even though Neill had sat through several movies that his friend had wanted to watch. Riley had missed out on the movie whenever I went to Canberra since he wasn’t feeling good and had regretted it ever since. So, he finally said he’d go see the movie with Neill which made him very excited! They were planning on catching a matinee movie while I went to the library to work on my last Creative Arts project for the semester. Time went by rather quickly but I was able to get about halfway done with my reflective blog. As I was walking through the park to go meet up with Riley at the shopping centre (where the movie theatre also is) I could see the storm clouds rolling in. It made me think of Fiji and the awesome double rainbow that we saw as we were walking back from the town. I couldn’t help but wish a rainbow would appear now as I looked to my right and it was almost like a dream come true. Off into the distance, past all the trees was an almost vertical rainbow! I couldn’t believe it. Then as I was about to cross the street to go into the shopping centre I looked over to the city and there was the other end of the rainbow! I tried to send Riley a message to let him know my location and that he should hurry to see the rainbows but as I sent it they instantly disappeared. Riley actually really enjoyed the Star Trek movie and the theatre that he watched it in. He went on and on about how comfy the seats were and how there was so much leg room as well as there only being about sixteen seats in the theatre. I can imagine why their tickets prices are so high now, but we’re excited to see what an IMAX theatre is going to look like now! The night was spent quietly since we stayed in to try and plan our upcoming trips to the Great Barrier Reef and Tasmania/Melbourne.

So you're going to carry that around all day?

I know Lauren had been craving some French toast, so I decided that today I would be her master chef.  Although I thought it was pretty basic, Lauren seemed to love every bit of it! I’m not sure if it was because of the vanilla or not, but she said I was her hero because of it. French toast was a perfect breakfast for today because we planned on going to the Campsie food festival! We’ve been waiting for this day for a long time now, and it finally came. We took the bus to Campsie, which was about 45-50 minutes – yes, we traveled that far on a bus just for food! When we arrived the smell of food filled the air, and boy did it smell delicious! We didn’t know where to go first, so we went down the main road. Even though we were at a food festival, Lauren managed to scope out some scarves that she couldn’t resist since they were only $2! Once the scarf pandemonium was over, we actually managed to make it to the food! As we rounded the corner, we both saw a ‘decorate your own cupcake’ stand and needless to say we both wanted to do this! When we made it to the stand, the lady bluntly said ‘sorry, this is for kids’. Say what?? Who says were still not kids at heart! She made us both mad, not only because she said it was only for kids, but mainly because she denied us from cupcakes, and you don’t want to get in between Lauren and her cupcakes! So, flustered as we were, we decided to move away from the food for a little and go check out some rides. Most of the rides were for little kids, but there was one ride that even big kids were doing – the monster slide! Lauren and I lined up and were both very excited because it has been forever since we’ve done county fair rides like this. As we made our way to the top, we both felt like kids again holding our potato sack and all. We even got a video of our trip down!

It was so much fun to go down the huge slide, racing each other. Once we had enough of the slide we decided that we would go and try some of the real reason we came to the festival.  We browsed stalls upon stalls of food from around the world, such as Turkish delights, Skewers, and lots of Chinese food! It all looked so delicious we wanted to eat everything up! Unfortunately, our wallets didn’t allow us to do that, so we had to stick with a 10 dollar budget which we had saved through the week. Even though we were on a slightly tight budget, we managed to scope out some skewers that were only three dollars apiece. They had a couple of different flavors, such as beef, chicken dim sim, and some other one that we weren’t too interested in. As you know, we can’t pass up on chicken, so we decided to get two skewers of chicken. We can’t describe how delicious they were! I started to chow down on mine until I saw that Lauren was savoring hers, and I thought that would be a good idea. We made our way back to the main part of the festival where they had a Korea cooking lesson going on. The chef was making rice cakes, which was nothing we had never heard of before. He was cooking in front of a panel of important people, which we never did find out why they were important. The art of rice cakes seemed a lot more difficult than we had guessed. The chef hammered out rice with a huge mallet, pounding on the rice in hopes to make it tender. After much pounding, he was able to pull off pieces and make them into little balls in which he rolled them around in different coating flavors. We knew that samples would be coming out, so we headed to the line before everyone came rushing in. Plain and simple, rice balls are not our thing. The before, during, and after taste of the rice cakes was pretty nasty especially since they are all filled with some type of bean or jelly pastry. Once we threw away the rest of our samples, we needed to get the taste out of our mouth, so what better to do it with than a corn on the cob! We had been keeping our eye on some corn the whole day, and we were luckily to be able to find some at a local church booth which was selling them for only two dollars an ear! We were more than happy to buy some since we both loved corn, not to mention it also made it feel more like fall. As we ate our corn, we headed back to the local grocery store where we saw 10 kilo bags for only 3 dollars – trust me, this is super exciting! Once we arrived at the store, we noticed a group with dragon costumes who looked like they were getting ready for a performance. We decided to wait on the potatoes and I’m glad we did because the performance was awesome!

After the performance we grabbed our potatoes and went off in search of a bus to take us back into town since we had also planned on going to a huge garage sale we had seen advertised on line. The ride back definitely didn’t seem as long as the first, mainly because we actually knew where we were going this time! With the 10 kilos of potatoes in my bag, I thought it would be a good idea if we unloaded those first before heading off to the garage sale. Turned out to be a good idea because we were able to get our skateboards in the process which was helpful since we were never able to find the garage sale! We traveled along Oxford Street for what seemed like ages until we came to a crossroads with no street signs and decided to just call it a loss. Although we did not find the garage sale, we did find Vitoria Barracks, which is a military base in Sydney that we didn’t know existed. We wanted to go in, but they said you could only enter on Thursdays, so we decided that next Thursday would be our day to explore, or rather take a tour of Victoria barracks. Once again our stomachs were rumbling so we decided to go back and make some dinner. It was chicken salad night and we were both more than ready! We hurried up and chomped those salads down because it was Saturday, which also meant it was possible firework night at Darling Harbor! We hadn’t been lucky in the past, and it didn’t seem we were going to get any luckier today because it started to drizzle outside as we left. The drizzling never stopped, and when we arrived the drizzle turned into more of a rain shower. Before we left, we looked on the website to see if they would still do fireworks when it rained, but they had no cancellation information so we decided we would try our luck. Once we arrived at 8:30 on the dot, we were expecting to hear some booms and bangs, but we didn’t hear any of that. We thought we would wait it out just to see if they were going to light any off, but sadly, after waiting for more than 30 minutes, we decided to leave.  The world must know that we want to see the fireworks, because every Saturday it seems to rain! We headed back, slightly disappointed, but at the same time knowing we would catch it someday. 

The Black Pearl

The due date of my Creative Arts resource kit has finally arrived, not that it snuck up on me or anything. I had known about it all long but just didn’t have enough motivation and clarity to work on it throughout the semester. I wasn’t the only one though since every class started with several people asking questions about what they could or couldn’t do for the project. I had gone in to talk to my teacher one on one about it and had come out of her office with a much clearer view. That didn’t mean I was going to get to work on it right away though since I had other things in Sydney to do. So I stayed up fairly late the night before and decided to wake up early this morning to finish the project up for good. I was supposed to be using a stimulus (Wizard of Oz) to create 8-10 learning activities for an elementary classroom. Doesn’t really seem that hard until you put in all these extra requirements like excursions and other KLA links, which I had no idea what that even meant. So I was definitely feeling a little overwhelmed, but not enough to freak out. I was just ready to have the project done with so I could move on with better things. We eventually made it to the library to re-read all my activities, make sure they made sense and prepare my resource kit. Riley thankfully took on the task on making a nice little basket as my box. It was supposed to be Dorothy’s straw basket and I think it turned out just right! I successfully got it turned in thirty minutes from the due time, but I wasn’t the only one freaking out since my class facebook page was getting bombed with post after post about questions. I had plans to meet up with a girl from my class and go out to dinner once again so I had a little bit of time on my hands. I was just thankful to be able to relax and have a burden lifted off my shoulders. Riley and I ventured off to the shopping centre in search of note cards so that he could write down some of the recipes he has been engrossed in. I know he’s ready to have his own kitchen and utensils to just cook to his heart’s content, but until then he’s settling for creating a recipe collection. We had no idea what we were about to encounter though; a notecard famine in Sydney. Literally no one sells notecards, like the 3x5 cards you can find in just about any store in the United States. Target, Kmart, stationary stores, none of them had these cards. We finally got directed to a newsagency store that had a pack of 100 for 8 dollars. I couldn’t believe it! Riley seriously contemplated them, but I knew he would regret it if he paid that much for simple notecards. He went back empty handed, while I met up with my friend Serena and headed off to have meat pies at the famous Harry’s café de wheels. A new place had opened up just across from the central bus station in literally two weeks. Serena was amazed that she hadn’t seen the place yet, not even a sign for it. The pies were delicious, but quite the challenge to eat since they didn’t give us a fork. Afterwards we were too full to sit still so we went for a walk down George Street to look at another shop for index cards, with none in sight. Serena was in the mood for a chatime drink and I had never had one, but had always wanted to try one, so I told her I would join her. We ended up in Chinatown at this overly crowded chatime where I ordered a caramel milk tea with pearls. These pearls are just little black jellies apparently that don’t really have much favor. I punctured the straw through the covering over the drink and took a nice big sip. However, I didn’t take into account the size of the pearls and the size of the straw and ended up with a big jellies in my mouth that I wasn’t expecting! I’m not a fan of having jelly like things in my mouth so no doubt I had a surprised look on my face. Serena thought this was hilarious but I tried my best to keep an excited, rather than disgusted face as I slowly chewed on the jellies. She was right, they had no taste and I had to try my best to not spit them out! But for the price I paid for that drink, I was for sure going to finish it! The tea itself was pretty good though. We took our drinks and headed back towards the university before saying our goodbyes. I saved a little bit of my drink for Riley which he wasn’t too fond of either. We ended up just relaxing for the night and finally getting around to watching the Notebook. For the record – he actually admitted to liking it!

It would have made it Lauren!

I have come to really come to look forward to and enjoy skyping with my family on Thursday mornings. It is nice to be able to hear about what is going on back home as well as catch them on my Australian stories so they don’t have to wait until I get home to hear them all. I knew that I had a Creative Arts project lingering over my head that I had successfully put off until the last few days before it was due but I was willing to put it off even longer to go out and visit the Sydney Wild Life attraction with Riley. We had about another two weeks before the tickets expired so we had to make sure to be able to use them before they went bad. We had always seen the koala bears on the stands outside the Wild Life centre every single time we walked by and today was like no other with the cutest koala just sleeping away!

We took the normal entry pictures that they try and sell you at the end of the trip and wandered our way inside and down all the railing mazes. I guess they have those out for crowded days but we luckily have never experienced that. Again, the pictures will do most of the talking. We started out in the butterfly room where butterflies were flying all around us. I had read that they were attracted to bright colors and I thanked myself for wearing a bright t-shirt. However, the butterflies seemed more into chasing each other around then landing on people. Riley was the first to become the butterfly whisperer when he nuzzled his finger up to a perched butterfly and he gracefully climbed unto his finger. These are seriously some of the cutest pictures!

Reunited and it feels so good!

I, of course, had to have my go with the butterflies but definitely didn’t have as good of luck. Whether I did have one close to getting on my finger I would have to yell for Riley to come over since he was off chasing more butterflies and take my picture, which by that point the butterfly had gotten scared and flown off. Finally, after many trials I finally got my own picture with a butterfly on my finger! 

If we had to leave then, I would have been satisfied! But we still had a lot more animals to see like jumping mice which were cute only because they were in an enclosed area, kangaroos, crocodile, a colorful emu, and wallabies. We attended as many talks as we could from the zookeepers as we have found those to be pretty personal and informative. The kangaroo exhibit is actually in an open area where the kangaroos get to freely roam around even though I know they’re smart to stay in their area far away from the humans. The feeding trough was close to the footpath which meant the kangaroos had to come up close to eat. We listened intently as the zookeeper told us all about the kangaroo life cycle and how the females can pause their pregnancy until they ‘get their life together.’ I found this to be very cool, although she said this is the reason why Australia is overrun with kangaroos since they can basically just have a baby whether they want. But because we were listening intently to her talk we were the first to be able to go out and pet a kangaroo while they were eating. Turns out as long as they have food they are content with being pet, unlike dogs. They really are very soft and not that scary up close, although they did have a statue of a grown 6 foot male kangaroo in the corner which would definitely make me shake in my boots if I saw him in the wild!

Riley acted like he was all big and bad next to him though.

We tried to catch the crocodile talk next but had no idea where to meet up since there was three viewing stations for the crocodile and decided to pass. We stuck around for the koala bear talk as well as watched other people pay $20-$35 dollars to have their picture taken next to a koala bear. We were definitely thankful we got to do is within the first weekend for a much better price. Did you know that the koala bears are also marsupial animals, meaning they have a pouch for their young? We had just found that out the other day, which is pretty cool! Other than that, koala bears really aren’t that interesting since they sleep for about 20 hours of the day and only eat certain leaves. Apparently their brains are so small that they don’t have the capacity to learn new habits and patterns. If the zookeepers were to pull the leaves off the branches and put them on a plate for the koala bears they wouldn’t know how to eat them. After the koala bear talk, we had seen just about everything and decided to head out before it got too late. We were also keen on going to the markets to possibly get some souvenir shopping done. Once we finally got back it was time for a quick dinner before we headed off to trivia at Kelly’s! It felt like we hadn’t been there in forever, but really it had been about two weeks. With four people there we had high hopes for the night but once again, things weren’t in our favor. It didn’t help that the crossword theme was famous fictional female characters. I’m not one for remembering names and obviously the guys don’t watch a lot of girly TV shows so we didn’t start off on a good note. But by the end of the night we had successfully filled in all but four blanks which was quite the accomplishment! We did alright on the questions but I’m still kicking myself over not remembering who sang my favorite song. I seriously had a mind freeze and couldn’t remember that Rick Springfield sang Jesse’s Girl, Riley’s mom will be shocked as well. I was able to make a come back and put down who sang my other favorite song called Maniac Monday though! This was my night for trivia I though! Then came the paper airplane contest…Riley has been talking and talking about this contest saying that one day he will get it out the door and I believe that he can. He folded, double folded and triple folded the airplane this time and just chucked it as hard as he could towards the door. When it was about to sail through the opening it hit the very tiptop corner of the door frame and jammed into the ground. This was quite the dash to Riley’s dream especially since we know it would have gone through had it not hit the corner. Neill had been talking about going for frozen yogurt afterwards since the first round so we decided to all take a trip down King Street to find a nice yogurt place. Apparently these shops are popping up all over Sydney just like back home in Goldsboro, where you can choose your yogurt, how much you want and then choose the toppings to put on there. They don’t have as many candy ingredients to choose from, but they do have miniature versions of everything else. It was nice to have casual conversations with the guys which quickly turned into travel stories once again. Neill’s friend, Terrid has recently been to Europe so I got into conversation with him about where to go. He keeps telling me that Prague is a must, so I’ll probably have to make that happen. He also shared stories about Octoberfest, which gets me curious how my experience there will be. Even though we didn’t win trivia, it was probably one of the best nights out with the guys! We unfortunately had to tell Neill that we have just five weeks left in Sydney and that put a damper on his night. We’re all confident that we’ll run into each other in the future again though!

Hey, its free!

Today we had class, but it wasn’t like every other Wednesday – today was our last day of classes! It was rather exciting for the both of us, but I know I wasn't super excited because Wednesdays are always my long days. Although it was the last day of class, the professors didn’t think much of it since they just went on about their normal lectures. By the time I was out of my last class, Lauren had already started making dinner, which consisted of fish sandwiches and vegetables! Lauren is becoming quite the chef because she toasted the buns and everything, plus they were delicious! We had to hurry though because we were actually meeting Sarah and Amberly, friends that Lauren had met in Canberra. It was Sarah's last day in Australia and she really wanted to see Vivid Sydney, so we thought that we could be her tour guides since we were locals. We met up with them at the hostel that she was staying at, but before we could go to Vivid Sydney, Sarah and Amberly wanted Pie Face since they had not eaten at all that day. Once we got the pies, we headed off to the main attractions. Although Lauren and I have seen a couple things of Vivid Sydney, we knew we hadn't seen everything. The first thing we came across was an odd shaped object that was smoking.

Yes, these are traffic cones.

We weren’t sure if this was normal, but once it happened again, we knew it was part of the show. The next light show that we saw was the tunnel of lights. Yes, it was literally just a tunnel of lights. We all thought it was cool because it’s just something that we had never seen before. An older lady actually came up to me and asked what does the tunnel do and all I could say was it lights up. 

We all decided that we wanted to see the Opera House from the bridge, because we had heard that it was the best place for the view. Once we were on the bridge, we were all speechless on how awesome the Opera House actually looked!

It was absolutely amazing and we all didn’t want to go, but Luna Park was calling Sarah’s name since that was another place she wanted to go before she left. As we made our way to Luna Park, we all talked about the booth there, where apparently you could change the lights on the bridge. We were all excited to do this, we were only afraid it would cost a lot of money. When we made it to Luna Park, we were once again reunited with the scary face!

And a great view of the bridge!

After about 20 minutes of picture taking, we finally managed to make our way into the park, which we soon found out was closing. Everything in the park seemed to be closed, except for the Ferris wheel because they said it is the best place to see Sydney Vivid. Although we didn’t go on the Ferris wheel, we did manage to make it to the booth where you could change the color of the Harbor Bridge! The station was awesome! Lauren and I tried to make the bridge American by changing the colors to red, white, and blue, but since we weren’t able to make the bridge white, we unfortunately couldn’t do it L We were able to get free pictures with the colors in the background though! Sarah and Amberly were able to get a photo of themselves, as well as bring us in for one big group photo! With the night growing old, it was time to say goodbye to our friends. While they chose to take the train back to their hostel, Lauren and I decided to walk across the bridge just to see the Opera house again, which this late in the night was gorgeous!

5, 4, 3, 2, 1, nothing!

Whenever we came to Sydney we must have been memorized by all the bike riders that were allowed to ride in the streets with the other cars that we thought we needed our very own bike. We were able to find a good deal on a bike and were avid about riding it to get some good use out of it. However, those days have come and gone and our bike has not been ridden in a few weeks, so we knew it was time to get rid of it before we left. We put an ad up on gumtree, and hadn’t gotten a response for a few days now. We had nearly forgotten about it until we got a late night text from a guy that was interested and wanted to pick it up in the morning. Riley was beyond excited about this and got up early to go inflate the tires and everything! The guy was coming all the way from West Sydney suburbs to check out the bike which is a good 45 minutes away. That also meant with the Sydney traffic that he was late for our meet up time which didn’t make me too fond of him. I had a Creative Arts 2 project to worry about that I may, or may not have, pushed off to the side and forgotten about until one week before it was due. In the meantime, Riley preoccupied himself with finally figuring out how to fold down this supposedly foldable bike. We got about half of it folded but absolutely could not get the handlebars to move in any direction. In all the moving around, we somehow deflated the front tire that Riley had gone to inflate that morning. We felt horrible about not having the tires blown up for the guy to give it a test run, but turns out he just wanted a fast deal and didn’t care to take it for a test ride. He also only wanted to know how to fold the bike in the middle and said he already knew how to fold the handlebars. We couldn’t believe our luck, especially since he didn’t even try to talk down our price any! Riley was beyond ecstatic, as was I, but I was also just ready to get started on my project again. Plus we had limited time because today we were climbing the SYDNEY HARBOUR BRIDGE! This had been Riley’s surprise birthday present from his mom and I had planned it as close to his birthday as possible. But we also wanted to plan it during Vivid Sydney, which is when the Opera House lights up in the beautiful colors that are seen on postcards. Our bridge climb was set for 4 o’clock in the afternoon, with the climb allegedly going to take 3.5 hours which would put us on the bridge for both the sunset and Vivid. We were beyond excited with only a bit of disappointment from the clouds that kept rolling in. We had planned on leaving early giving us plenty of time to leisurely walk down to Circular Quay and to the Bridge Climb center, but somehow time got away from us again. We were able to catch the free bus down to the Harbour though and did a fast walk over to the meeting place where we ended up being very early. This gave us plenty of time to look around the gift shop as well as get even more excited to do the climb. When they finally called our group we were able to meet our group mates that would climb with us, as well as sign our life away. This definitely remembered us of skydiving, but we knew this wouldn’t be nearly as scary. Then it came time for us to put on tons of equipment! I had no idea that it would take so much equipment to simply climb a bridge. There was a jump suit, jump pants that were rain repellent, gloves, beanies, harness, and a fleece jacket and rain jacket in bags attached to the back of our belts. Along with a radio and headset that would be used to hear our tour guide the whole time. We were both feeling rather attractive after that and able to move about freely as you can imagine. Actually we felt like penguins having to waddle everywhere.

That's only the suits, not any of the equipment!

In the Bridge Climb building they had a small replica of the ladders on the actual bridge to have the participants have a try at using their equipment to get up the ladders. We all had some type of metal runner that would be attached to us and the wire along the bridge the whole way up. Once we attached to the wire we would be stuck on it until the very end of the climb and I was lucky enough to go in front! A few other people had already done the climb before and encouraged Riley and I to be the first pair up to get the best view. We of course didn’t complain and took them up on the offer. We made our way through a small tunnel in the bridge and were soon on the rafters walking right over the streets of Circular Quay. I don’t know how we never noticed people walking right above us before, but it was cool to have a bird’s eye view of everything. The scariest part was definitely having to climb the first ladders right in the middle of traffic on the Harbour Bridge. Along the way, our awesome tour guy Brett, shared lots of stories about the creation and construction of the bridge. After we all made it up the ladders he told us to take a seat on the smaller stairs along the arch and have a look back at the city. He then told us about the construction guys that worked on the bridge and the hard task they had. We learned infinite amounts of information and stories that we’ll save for when we return. Okay I’ll share one fun fact: The Sydney Harbour Bridge was only supposed to last for 70 years, and has now been standing for 81 years! Brett decided to tell us that right before we started the Bridge Climb which was of course was very reassuring! But Sydney has been working very hard on sandblasting the foundation to put another 20 years into the lifespan. However, they’ve been at this for about 7 years now and won’t be finished for another 3 years. They might as well make this a permanent job because once they finish they’ll have to turn right back around and start again! Brett made us stop several times along the journey to take pictures that they would try to sell us at the end, but Riley and I were more interested in the view. We weren’t allowed to bring our camera with us so we had to take a lot of mental pictures. We also talked with the Australian girls behind us that were from Adelaide and visiting Sydney on their holiday. We got to the top rather quickly and Brett informed us we still had about 10 more minutes until the Opera House was scheduled to light up. He also said that we weren’t supposed to stall up there since another group would be coming, but we said he’d break the rules for us if we didn’t tell on him. That meant we were allowed to wait as long as another group didn’t come up behind us. This also meant it was just about the longest 10 minutes of our lives, but we passed the time by talking to Chazz and Jazz from Adelaide. We even did the New Year’s Eve countdown of 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and nothing happened. That felt like a complete crush of all our childhood dreams, but not even 10 seconds later and it lit up! We were both amazed at how beautiful and peaceful the city of Sydney looked from the top of the bridge. It felt like a personal show just for us, but like anything else the moment had to come to an end all too soon. We crossed the middle beams of the bridge and started to walk down the other side. We were actually part of the Vivid crew and got to wear our own reflective jackets so that people could see us lit up walking down the bridge. All the way down the bridge we were able to catch glimpses of the Opera House and the amazing show at the Harbour that was being put on. There were many light displays all around the wharfs that we could also see, along with the skyscrapers that had turned a different color with the nightfall. I particularly liked watching the roaring traffic go by underneath us, which definitely reminded me of New York City where people always have more important places to be. By the end, we were all a lot hungrier than we had expected and ready to get out of pounds of unneeded gear! We had been lucky enough to not get any rain and the wind hadn’t been as cold as we had expected. We shredded layer upon layers, collected our free group picture from the top of the bridge, certificate and headed out the door. We had food on our minds and had decided on trying kangaroo for the first time. We had seen this shop on George Street that sold kangaroo, and with it being the only one we had seen in Australia so far, we had to settle for that. We order our kangaroo burgers and waited to have them made fresh! The burgers actually cost just as much as a regular burger would since we got two burgers and fries for $20. Now you can see why we don’t eat out very often! We took our first bite without knowing what to expect but were pleasantly surprised. It tasted just like beef but a little chewier and tougher, but really it wasn’t bad at all. Plus we’re huge fans of burgers anyways, so we were happy campers. And we were able to cross another thing off our Australia bucket list so it was a great way to end an amazing day!