A Land Down Under

I know we've been in Australia for over two weeks, but I feel like being in Sydney really feels like Australia. We woke up early in our hotel room with a view of the Sydney Harbour Bridge to watch the Badgers knock off no. 1 seed Villanova (wohoo!) then went down to the lounge for a free hot breakfast.

Then we walked 3 minutes from our hotel and purchased our Opal cards (public transport cards in Sydney) and hopped on a ferry. I've never ridden a ferry at all, so it was different to ride it for casual public transportation purposes. On the ferry we had great views of the Harbour bridge and of the Sydney Opera House.

We got off at the Cremona Point Wharf and walked along the coastline to the Mosman wharf. It was such a beautiful walk! It had fantastic harbor views, beautiful old houses, and unique pretty flowers. I loved every minute of it, except for maybe when we spotted huge spiders right off or above the path. We even got to go down to an old lighthouse at Robertsons point, where I made Matt go out to take a picture with me and right then there was a big wave and splashed all over us. I wish Jack would've gotten that candid picture! This was right after that happened:

And more from the walk:

After the walk we took the ferry from Mosman wharf back to Circular Quay, the wharf right next to our hotel. From there we walked along the harbor to the Sydney Opera House. We took lots of pictures and then wandered in to check out what was playing. We decided to buy tickets to the opera for Wednesday night! I'm really excited for that. We decided to see Tosca, but we debated for awhile between that and La Boheme. I think both would've been great. But Isn't that crazy?! We're going to see an opera at the Sydney Opera House!

Then we meandered through the botanical gardens as we worked our way indirectly back to our hotel. When we were a few blocks away it started to sprinkle so we rushed back to the hotel to grab afternoon tea. Afternoon tea ended up being mostly candy and not sustainable food like I was hoping, but it got us through the afternoon anyway.

For the afternoon we tossed around several different ideas but ended up riding the bus up to the "little Italy" area, which turned out to be not very Italian. Just a couple of restaurants but nothing like what we've seen in other cities. But we grabbed some really good cheesecake from a place that we read had the "best cheesecake in Sydney". It was really good, but not life-changing. Then we decided we should probably eat some real food so we decided on an Italian place and got some food. We ended up eating our entire dinner backwards: cheesecake, entrees, then salad. Not sure why the salad came out last but it did.

We rode the bus back to our hotel area and decided to walk around a bit in an area known as "The Rocks" which is mostly bars and restaurants. Not too much going on on a Sunday night but it was really nice out and good to walk off dinner a bit.

That's pretty much it for today! I took a ton of pictures today and struggled to narrow it down on what to include here, so check out the album for more if you're interested.