Jetlagged in Sydney

Welcome to Sydney ;)

We started out our first day in Sydney by doing a hop-on-hop-off tour of the city. In the hour and a half bus tour we saw most of the big sights including the opera house. Somehow we managed to stay interested, but dozed off in the afternoon at our lovely (?) Chinese hotel. We only slept a few hours the night before as our room looked out to a car park where nightly work was being very, very noisily conducted at 3 am. The fridge we learned should be turned off every night to avoid nightly heartattacks from the sudden noises, and the toilet should be flushed regularly (even when not in use) to stop the water from pouring. Three stars is a bit different down under...

The second day we again spent in sleepless frenzy. We wanted breakfast at 4 am, but no luck. Nothing happens here until about 8 am. So we watched bad sitcoms on the laptop and waited and waited. After breakfast we had a tour of Bondi beach. That was great, but we kinda realised that the very hot streets of Sydney would not keep us long interested as the waves beakons...

As the day before we walked and walked the rest of the day. Improving those leg muscles and making us nearly scream of pain in the evenings of muscle spasms. All those long evenings in the office sure didn't prepare us for these marathon walks!

We escaped the heat in the airconditioned Sydney Aquarium where we dutifully took notes of the many hidden dangers lurking in Australia's blue waters. Too many and too scary to even phantom...

On Friday we decided that we had been lazy enough and now was the time to get our crap together. We started by opening a bank account. Now this was a relatively painless experince although gotta hand it to the tellers that working in a office with no air-con seemed excruciating...In Australia you need a local phone number AND address for everything. And keep your passport handy because even the pre-paid phone cards only work after a twenty minute phone interview. No reason given why all this is needed as you've already paid the card.

After this was done we decided to hit the car markets targeted for backpackers. Well, needless to say that was an original experience as we were told we couldn't buy a car (cause there weren't enough on sale) that buying a car privately or from a dealer would be too difficult and that dealing with the national transport authorities way too difficult for us to understand. This naturally enraged us. Buying a car (especially in an English speaking country...and in a developed one for that matter) ain't exactly rocket science! But we were told at the popular and Lonely Book favorite "Backpacker's Car market" that we were going to hit trouble if we didn't let them do everything for us. We were offered two crappy cars that probably would have left us stranded in the middle of Sydney with an equally crappy buy back. No thanks! We decided to either get on a bus or train, but get out of Sydney we would (but not in their worned down Holden...). In the afternoon we strained ourselves in the Wildlife Zoo. Yet again we eagerly learned about the dangers in this country, but this time those on land. So basically wherever you are here, you're in danger. Great. But no worries, we now know what to look out for. We even saw the deadliest organism in the world, the box jellyfish which to our relief has an anti-venom. Unfortunately this must be be administered almost immidiately after exposure by a professional so that doesn't really help unless you get stung outside a hospital...