Randoms

A few random recent pictures:



Rob and I on night out in Darling Harbour


Playing the "pokies"-what they call slot machines


What I walk by every day on my way to work


Another spot that I pass on my walk to work: Martin Place





Some of the "artwork" in the lobby of my office building. It's strange.


Lobby at work

The largest Apple Store in the Southern Hemisphere just opened up in Sydney last month. It's enormous and wildly popular. Especially with the release of the first iPhone in Australia. There was a line out the door for a week!




Playing


Cool staircase in the Apple Store


View from my "front yard" on Market Street


My home! We live just above the gray part which are the parking levels.


Our new house pet. Just kidding. Rob took this picture at Wildlife World.

Good Food and Wine Festival and Sydney Film Festival

Rob scored us 1/2 price tickets to Sydney's Good Food & Wine Festival at the Sydney Exhibition Center. The event was spread over three halls with more than 300 exhibitors comprising Australia's leading wine companies and most innovative food marketers and producers showcasing the latest culinary trends from all around the world. We were able to entertain and stuff ourselves all day and sample free food, see a live cooking demonstration from celebrity television chefs Matt and Tobie and try more wines than you could imagine.

A couple of the wine vendors were some of the same wineries that we visited on our tour of the Hunter Valley back in March:







We got to go to another festival too: The Sydney Film Festival that showcased contemporary cinema from Australia and around the world. The event was established in 1954 and is a major cultural event on the city's social calendar and one of the world's longest running film festivals. Rob and I only got to get to one film which was shown at the State Theatre in the heart of the Central Business District on Market Street. We saw a film called Married Life with Rachael McAdams and Pierce Brosnan.

Another Celebrity Sighting

This may not mean anything to those of you who don't watch the Australian "The Biggest Loser", but those of us on welfare cable in Australia who make a nightly ritual out of it will appreciate this:

I just saw SHANNON! The GORGEOUS male trainer from the show. Katie, Gracie, Karla, Melanie, and everyone else who tuned in to The Biggest Loser 6 nights a week last season will appreciate my star-struckedness. He was walking down George Street holding hands with his girlfriend and I was without a camera. :( I stood in the middle of the street staring for a good 2-3minutes debating whether to follow him or to go on to work. I had to let him go, but maybe we'll cross paths again.

PS-As I typed this and posted the pictures, I just realized that I may in fact be: The Biggest Loser.

Blue Mountains

I didn't get the long Memorial Day weekend that most of you guys (US friends and family) got, but Monday June 9th was the Queen's Birthday-an Australian holiday-so I did get to enjoy the 3 day weekend for that one. Rob and I headed to the Blue Mountains for a weekend getaway in hopes of taking in the beautiful scenery and views. The weather ended up working against us for most of the weekend, but we made the best of it anyway.

After work on Friday and making a quick appearance at my co-worker's farewell party, Rob and I headed for the train station for a 2 hour ride to Katoomba-a cute little mountain town in the Blue Mountains.

We arrived around 9:00pm and checked into our hostel called the Central Backpacker's Hostel right near Katoomba station. It's only about 3 years old and it was pretty nice for a hostel. There was a cozy little fireplace in the lobby with a pool table, Foosball table, flat screen TV, large fully equipped kitchen, television room with lots of couches, and a few computers with free Internet (that happened to be down the whole time we were there).

Once we got to the hostel and checked in, we dropped off our bags and headed out to explore what Katoomba's nightlife had to offer. The first little pub that we stopped into was called Blackburn's Family Hotel and Rob and I had more teeth than every other bar patron combined. The man rocking out on the electric guitar was surprisingly good and the 3 LARGE toothless women dancing were having the time of their lives. It was an unusual crowd but a lively one so we had a good time.

We hit up a couple of other little spots (below) before calling it a night and heading back to the hostel.

Saturday we got up early to head out for our horseback riding reservations at 9:30am. We caught the train to Blackheath and were picked up by a nice country Australian man to take us to Megalong Valley.

Once we got there-and only by the grace of God did we get there alive thanks to Billy Bob Speed Racer on the winding mountain roads-we met our horses and saddled up for the ride. Rob was on Lucille...

and I was on Tom....

I'm pretty sure that Tom was a teenager and didn't like to obey authority whatsoever. If there was a tree in the way on the trail and 3/4 of the trail was to the right of the tree, Tom would trot me around it and squeeze us through the 1/4 side scraping my face up with branches. It didn't matter how hard I pulled or kicked him, he did whatever he wanted. Tom and I took a few longcuts during the ride and I'd have to follow the leader's voice to get me back to the beaten path a couple of times. Tom also kept harassing the leader's horse in front of us and at one point the other horse gave a nice little back kick at us and nailed me in the foot. Ouch! Oh well, at least I had better luck than one of the other guys on the ride who fell off while we were trotting and his horse ran off into the wilderness. HAHAHA, hope that place has a good insurance policy!

We got a few good pictures during the tour:

After we rode horses we played dress-up in the retail store for a minute...

Gary Lane, the man that drove us back to the train station ended up being the coolest man we met in the Blue Mountains. He owns 2000 acres in the mountains and knows everything about the area. He drove us to a couple of lookout points over the Megalong Valley that we wouldn't have gotten to see otherwise because we didn't have a car.

Gary took us back to the Blackheath station and we rode the train back to Katoomba and took a nice long nap since it was wet and rainy outside. We got up and found a nice spot for dinner: a Mediterranian restaurant called Bacchus.

After dinner we stayed out for awhile and went to the same little night spots that we already knew of and a couple new ones and then called it a night.

The next morning we got up and had breakfast at a little cafe called Savoy in Katoomba and then bought tickets for the trolley to take us around and sight see for the day. Unfortunately, the rain and fog didn't make for good views at all. Our first stop was at Echo Point....

Supposedly there was a great view from here of the 3 Sisters-three mountains side by side that are are said to be 3 sisters who were turned to stone-but we saw nothing. The fog was awful. This was the gorgeous scenery we saw:

But we DID get to get our picture taken with the Koala:

Hahaha, how creepy is that guy? Pretty sure he didn't work around there; just did this as a creepy hobby. I think he just walked around there like that and in between pictures was shoplifting merchandise into his coat.

After Echo Point, the trolley took us over to Scenic World which, again, wasn't very scenic. We had passes to ride the cable car, skyway cart with the glass bottom, and the railway that took us down the old rail tracks that the coal miners used to use-the steepest railway in the world.

We hung out inside at Scenic World goofing off for awhile and then we had some coffee in the revolving restaurant hoping the weather would clear up as time went on, but it never really did.

We walked some of the walking trails and got really wet and didn't see anything too exciting until FINALLY we stumbled across a gorgeous waterfall: the Katoomba Cascades.

Our little trail walk was a long, wet one, but we pretty much reached a point where we couldn't get any colder or any wetter so we eventually stopped complaining and just went with it
.

After Scenic World and our wet trail walks we caught the trolley back to Echo Point and did a little wine and fudge tasting at a store there and grabbed some food and then headed back to the hostel.

That night we went out to the Carrington Hotel, an old heritage property built in the late 1800s. It was GORGEOUS on the inside so we sat around and had a couple of drinks at the hotel bar there called Champagne Charlies.

After that we called it a night and headed back to the hostel.

The next morning, Rob somehow managed to get me up at 6am to walk around Katoomba one last time before we left and I'm SO GLAD he did! We walked back to Echo Point and then did the same wet walk that we had done the day before, but this time we could actually see the views that the Blue Mountains had to offer. It was GORGEOUS!

The Three Sisters:

Enormous stairway to one of the Sisters:

"Climbing" a Sister:

More great views:

This was pretty cool because we were here on the Queen's Birthday:

After our 6am hiking adventure was over we trucked it back to the hostel to make our 10am checkout time and boarded the train back to Sydney to enjoy the rest of our holiday relaxing back in the city.