Australia Trip, Part 1

It’s five a.m. and I”m awake. Brad is trying to sleep. I went to sleep sometime after 7pm. I woke up at 9:45, 3 and 4. I’m fine. It’s just an adjustment to be in a time zone so far from home.

I got into the Sydney intl airport at about 8am yesterday, local time of course. Brad waited outside the security area while I was asked about foreign plants, controlled substances, and so on. I have a new stamp in my passport now. Yea!! I’ll have to look at that sometime. When Brad got me, we took the train to Central Station, near Sydney Harbour. The train had cars where some sections were double-decker. More coolness! We got off at Central, and walked to Cumberland Street, where the Sydney Harbour-the Rocks YHA youth hostel is located. I love it here. Although the room has no shampoo or tv, it has everything else. It’s quite similar to rooms I had in Finland hotels.

I took a shower, rested, then we headed out. It began to rain and rained until I fell asleep in the evening. We ate silly food yesterday. I had pancakes for lunch, and Brad had eggs benedict. At dinnertime, Brad had a dark chocolate milkshake while I had a Belgian waffle with dark chocolate-dipped fruit.

We shopped. There’s a bookstore near here with a selection of books that I like. I’d like to have the entire collection transported to my home. Then I could weed out the titles I don’t care for, later. Somebody at this store likes the Penguin publishing company a lot. There were two different Penguin series available. This was how I learned that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It may be simply that because Penguin is British, there's more traffic in Penguin books here. Back home, I live near a distribution point for Random House, and there is a large percentage of Random House books in our local bookstores.

I found a brown, broad-brimmed hat that I like. The humidity here means that, when I wear the hat, my hair makes a kind of half-sphere under the hat. Not really, but I do have very puffy hair in this weather. It’s like Baltimore in May or June.

It’s late spring here. There seems to be a lot of wisteria in Sydney, including a dark purple kind that is new to me. There are conifers and palms growing side by side. Brad and I walked to the Botanic Gardens. This collection has a lot of plants from other parts of the world, and I wasn’t always able to tell which ones were from where. We stopped to smell many roses. There was also a giant honeysuckle. The birds we saw were fun surprises. There are magpies here, which I have also seen in my home state of Washington, and in Finland. We also saw something like an ibis, and a smaller bird whose habits reminded me of a killdeer, except that it didn’t walk on the ground much. There were pigeons, and some kind of local gull. Also a duck that looked a lot like a Mallard, but wasn’t one.