Sydney day 1

G'day from Australia! Oh well, actually it should be g'night because it's about 11 PM here right now...

After a long, long flight during which we watched the probably most amazing sunrise you could ever imagine, we finally landed in Sydney - solid 18 degrees up here.

 We (that's me and my fellow two high school students, they are both going to Brisbane) were all so tired that we could barely walk, so the bus transfer to the youth hostel we will stay at for the next two days went by pretty silent. The first thing we did after entering our hostel (and yes, the first Australian sentence I heard was actually "No worries") was taking a quick shower, and although it was short, it immediately woke us up.

After dropping our stuff in our room we went for a walk in the downtown-city of Sydney. I was amazed that most of the people I saw were Asian - and I thought the city would be full of surfing, good-looking Australian guys... ;) And it wasn't only the people that looked Asian: the whole city really reminded me of Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. 7Elevens everywhere, and a lot of traffic lights.

Then we came across the Hyde Park, and I was finally fully aware of the fact that we really were in Australia, the country I've always wanted to go to, the country I had only seen on tv screens so far.

One of the many amazing things I saw after we entered the park (which is beautiful) was an ibis bird. It looked so weird with its long, thin, almost banana-shaped beak, but our "guide" (the person who will have to stand up for all our problems here in Australia for the next couple of months) told us that there were a lot of them here and that they were basically equal to the pigeons we have in Germany.

After crossing the entire park we finally saw the famous Opera House and the Harbour Bridge! There were lots of tourists up there (and we didn’t have enough time to go inside the Opera House anyway) so we decided not to spend hours watching something we had already seen a hundred thousand times on post cards and photos, so instead, we took the ferry to Manly.

After half an hour on the ferry we reached the island, and as soon we were there we headed straight to the beach. And that’s when I finally found the Australia I had always imagined: beautiful green-ish blue water, beach, surfers and sun… Paradise.

Sadly, we couldn’t stay too long a the beach. First, because we only had two hours time to spend on the island, and second… yep, it started raining. So we spent about one hour running through every shop we could find… oh, and we had the best. sushi. ever!

Long live Australia!