Kangaroos and Opera

Today is our last full day in Australia and there was no way I was leaving the country without ever seeing a kangaroo. So we started off the day by going to the Wild Life zoo in the Darling Harbour. It was a 20 min walk from our hotel and we pre-bought tickets online last night so we saved a bit of money that way.

It was pretty good. We got to see the quintessential Australian animals so it was exactly what we needed: Tasmanian devils, pandemelons, wallabies, kuckaberras, wombats, a cassowary, echidnas, koalas, quolls, lots of snakes, and finally... kangaroos! We also finally got to see some platypuses and a huge saltwater crocodile! Here are some of my favorite pictures from the zoo, as always you can check out the album for more.

A wallaby:

A cassowary (the third largest bird in the world):

Kangaroos! The guy on the left was hopping all over the place; I have a video of him too.

An echidna:

A Platypus! These little girls were tricky to get pictures of.

Here's the croc:

And another koala picture, because they are so dang cute:

From the zoo we walked over to the Sydney Fish Market. It was really crowded with a ton of tourists, but we managed to pull together some lunch. We ended up sharing some oysters, a lobster tail, and fish & chips. They had some huge crabs there though. And lots of octopus.

The rest of the afternoon was spent grabbing snacks at the hotel and running errands. I wanted to go see if I could find a cheap dress to wear to the opera for tonight. We went to a few stores that were way out of my price range before we wandered into H&M. There I found two dresses! One was $15 and the other was only $5! And that's Australian dollars so I was pretty pleased with that. Now I'll just need to figure out what to toss in order to make space in my bag for those... We were about to walk back to the hotel to get ready but it was pouring! So we grabbed an Uber instead.

We ate dinner at the hotel and then got ready for the opera. Luckily it stopped raining before we had to walk there. The opera is only a ten minute walk but it still would've been less than fun doing that in our nicest clothes.

The opera was great! We had pretty good seats in a side box so we were pretty close to the stage. We decided to see Tosca, which is a classic Italian opera that's set at the end of WWII in Rome. It had a powerful plot and the singing was amazing. It's unlike anything I've ever seen before and it's difficult to describe. It's a little strange at first that it's all in Italian but you get used to it eventually. There are subtitles at the top to help you understand what's going on, if the emotion in the songs doesn't make it clear enough. But I would definitely recommend the experience to someone if they've never seen an opera before to check it out. Plus it was fun getting all dressed up for once. Here's a picture of us right before the opera:

That's all for tonight! Matt and I fly to New Caledonia tomorrow.