Okay, so to update on things here. I went to the city on Thursday to do some sightseeing. I was going to get on one of those red double-decker buses like they have in NYC but I ended up walking around being my own tour guide. I started at Darling Harbour which isn’t the main harbour but it’s really nice. I walked around there for a little bit and then made my way uptown to the main harbour area towards the Opera House. I took a tour of the opera house which lasted about an hour. The Sydney Opera House is really a big complex that has about seven theaters (4 small ones and 3 main big ones). Each theater usually has a show every night so there are thousands of people going to see shows there very night. I got to see the inside of the three main theaters: The drama theater (which was a basic theater), the opera theater (which was bigger and higher up and shaped specifically for operas), and the concert hall which was totally amazing. It has over 2000 seats all the way around the stage and has a bunch of features to enhance the acoustics. Each seat is really comfortable and shaped in a way that if the theater is partially empty, the sound will bounce off the seats and still sound like the theater is completely full. It may not sound as cool when I describe it so check it out yourself. The whole area is beautiful and it’s on the harbour and right next to the Harbour Bridge (I keep writing harbour with a “u” because that’s how it is here). I’m going to try and see a show in the concert hall while I’m here.
This past weekend was really good. I went to that AUJS weekend thing and it was really fun. I met a lot of really nice people there and a bunch of them offered to have me over for a shabbos. There was about 30 people there (mostly younger students because it was mainly a meeting people thing) and they took us to a campsite about 2 hours outside of Sydney in the middle of nowhere. It was a nice place and the weekend in general was really nice. I’m very glad I went.
And I forgot to mention last week, I went last Saturday night with my friends, Taryn and Dani, to the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras parade (Don’t jump to conclusions about what you think of me, it was purely for fun). It was, to put it in simple terms, totally crazy. There were millions of people around the parade area, a lot of them dressed up in insane costumes. Everyone in the parade was in costume (mostly wearing nothing) and all the floats were blaring music and most of the marchers were doing dance routines. There were people lined up five deep on each side for miles and there were thousands of people watching from balconies and windows. Literally, the most people I’ve seen in one place ever. There were tons of drunk people especially teenagers and there were tons of bottles littering the streets. Walking back to the bus stop, the streets were completely crowded and this nice park in the middle of the city was totally full of drunk high school students. The lines getting into bars and clubs were going around the corners and I literally saw at least three fights break out. I was concerned for my safety and welfare (for more reasons than one) but we survived. I have some pictures, check it out.
NZ
So to backtrack a little bit, I want to write about the trip to New Zealand. First of all, I slept through most of the long flight and it honestly was not that bad. Taryn, Dani & I dropped our suitcases that we wouldn’t need during our stopover in Sydney and we had a brief glimpse of the Opera House and Harbour Bridge which is when it finally hit us that we were in Australia. We finally arrived in Christchurch, which is one of the bigger cities on the South Island, late that night and made it to our hostel. So I didn’t actually think about what the hostels were going to be like beforehand so I was in for a shock when got to our room, after 24 hours of flying, and there were three random people sharing it with us. It worked out fine and I eventually got used to hostel life. That was late Wednesday night so we spent Thursday just hanging out in the city because we weren’t starting the bus tour until Friday. Christchurch was a small, touristy city, which can best be described as “quaint”. There wasn’t much to do there so we walked around the Botanic gardens there for a while and mostly relaxed all day.
Early Friday morning, we started out with the bus tour. The name of the company is Kiwi Experience and it’s not exactly the kind of bus tour where everyone starts and finishes in the same place and you’re on different buses with different people almost every day. Everyone has their own itinerary of where they’re going and how many nights they want to stay in each city. It’s all very flexible. On the way to each city, the driver talks over the microphone to us about the city that we’re going to, where we can stay there, and what kind of activities that we can do. Most of the things like the hostels are recommended by the company so all the people on the Kiwi buses can be picked up from the same hostel, but everything is really up to us, especially the activities. The driver would pass around sign-up sheets of what we can do and how much they cost (We got small discounts for mostly everything through Kiwi) and they would book in advance whatever we needed. So that Friday, we made our way to a small town called Kaikoura where we stayed for two nights because of shabbos while most people only stayed one. The town sits along a shore line and there isn’t much to do there besides sea stuff like whale watching. We decided to go swimming with seals. Now, five years ago, I went snorkeling with dolphins and I basically was uncomfortable and freaking out the whole time. Two years ago, I went scuba diving around some coral and fish and totally loved it so I thought that my water-related fears were gone. When we got in the water to snorkel with the seals, I quickly realized that it wasn’t true. The water was freezing despite the wetsuits, and I was swimming along hoping that nothing would swim out from under me. The group was all bunched together and I kept getting hit and kicked in the face by the other swimmers as I was trying to calm myself and stop my heart from pounding through the wetsuit. Luckily, or unluckily for most people, the seals were apparently not that friendly that day and only one really came near us in the water. We got somewhat close to some of them on the rocks which was cool and I saw some cool fish but all in all, I was happy to get out of there as soon as possible. Our hands and feet were seriously numb when we got out so we tried recovering for a while and then we made some pasta for dinner before shabbos started.
So like I said, there wasn’t much to do in Kaikoura. It was freezing down by the water and the waves looked like they would kill anyone who tried swimming in them. So we woke up, ate breakfast, and then took a long nap. We spend most of the day at a picnic area near the water just talking and hanging out. Also, being late summer, and the South Island being pretty far from the equator, the days were really long and shabbos didn’t end until 9:30. We were off to a slow start, but we were really excited for the cities ahead of us…
