Our stay in Sydney was a combination of my closest heart-felt dreams come true... and about 5 minutes of my worst nightmare.
We left Wollongong pretty early in the morning, like 9am, after quickly checking out a few Sydney hotels online and booking one for the night. As it's only an hour and a bit away we arrived in downtown in the blazing heat. We'd looked at so many hotels online we totally forgot the name and address of the one we booked with so Ryan called them up on the cell to check in. Total crap directions and 30 minutes of Australian cursing through Sydney noonhour traffic later and we arrived at The Aspire in Darling Harbour.
Ryan was a little testy about getting incorrect directions, and secretly I think he was still hungover from getting totally plastered with the boys the night before last. Then the chick at the desk was a total idiot and couldn't make his card work, so we put it on my card. Then she gave me the room key - 108. Normally I don't like taking rooms on the first floor but at this point I just wanted air conditioning and lunch fucking ASAP.
We walk into the room and see three beds - a queen and two twins. I ask if Ryan had booked this on purpose in hopes of staging some kind of sexy party for tonight but he just laughed and grumbled something and crashed on one of the twin beds. Meh, whatever, party bed room it is. Turns out the queen bed was a total piece of shit so we joked about sleeping on the 2 twins 1950s style.
After a bit of cricket, a lie down in a cool room and some leftover bbq chicken we were refreshed and ready to hit the town. We started at the Sydney market which is like the Chinese night markets I visited in Taiwan only they were way way way less crowded, the prices weren't quite as cheap ($10 for a shirt instead of $3) and it was more kangaroos and koalas than D&G and Chanel knock offs.
With a cute new mu mu dress and an Aussie fridge magnet to add to my collection, we headed to the harbour and hopped on the Sydney ferry. For about $10 for two people, it's the fastest and least stressful way to get around the pretty touristy area in the harbour. We arrived at the Opera House and I was SO STOKED.
I've wanted to go to Australia since I was a kid, and especially over the past 5 or so years, any time I was unhappy with a job or a situation I was in I kind of visualized myself running away to Australia and standing in front of the Opera House with a triumphant "mwa ahahaha" - this dream came true for me, and in the best possible circumstances. :-)
Beautiful sunny day, in my favourite green skirt and fancy havianas, full of bbq chicken and on the arm of my Australian manwhich, waltzing into the Opera House for an architectural/ historical/ very nerdy tour - a very happy girl.
Two drawbacks - we waited in line for EONS because the dude at the ticket desk was having some kind of fight with someone on the phone named Veronica. At one point a dude near the front of the line shouted "FUCK VERONICA, I just want a fucking ticket!" I love this about Australians. <3 The second drawback was that we wouldn't be able to see the main stage during the tour, the big beautiful awe-inspring one, because Jimmy Buffet is using it to rehearse for his performance later that night. I love Jimmy Buffet and all the childhood memories I have with his music as the soundtrack, so I forgave him for taking a little of the luster off my Opera House moment. :-P
The tour was rad, and even though parts of it were really nerdy and kind of girly (like crap about ballet and art) Ryan totally blew me away with how into it he was. Not only was it amazing to share that tour with him couple-wise, but it was really cool to see him inspecting the tile work and admiring the lack of bubbles in the concrete or the type of wood they use along the walls. *sigh* so dreamy.
High on Opera House fever, we left and headed to a pub for a drink... or three. :-D Watched some cricket at a nearby patio and noticed a theme of 50somethings wearing Hawaiian shirts. In the toilet I learned that the 20 or so floral-patterned friends were headed to the same Jimmy Buffet concert, and were a dedicated fan group called The Parrotheads.
We walked back into Chinatown and got down on some serious sushi for dinner, pretty expensive but very very yummy. Got a bit lost walking back to the hotel but we managed to figure it out with the map we grabbed from the hotel lobby.
Back in the room Ryan passed out almost right away while I watched "Australia" on the tv, probably on in honour of upcoming Australia Day on the 26th. Please note, "Australia" is such a shit movie, even Hugh Jackman's hotness couldn't salvage how shitty Nicole Kidman's performance was. Earlier in the day I'd learned on my Opera House tour that she didn't even act in the Sydney Theatre Group, they delegated her to handing out programmes before the shows.
My back ached from watching the movie on the shitty queen bed and I went to bed, seeing that Ryan had pushed our two twin beds together, although mine which was closest to the patio door was about 4 inches higher than his. So cute. <3
At some point in the night, I wake up to Ryan yelling "There's a fucking crock on the bed over there!! Fucking Dean [his brother]"
"Baby, are you talking in your sleep??"
"oh fuck" mumble mumble mumble....
Later on in the night I wake up to "OI, WHAT???!?!?!?!?!?" in the scariest loud voice I've ever heard Ryan use. I sleepily roll off my stomach and ask him what the fuck and hear this THUMP run run run - he says "there's someone trying to get in the room." :-|
Apparently he woke up hearing a noise on the balcony and saw a shadow of someone right outside the sliding glass door of our first floor room. I freak out and ask if he locked the door before bed and he says "yeah, I didn't even go out there" and when he gets up to check he finds that THE DOOR IS OPEN BY TWO INCHES. That's right, a total psycho was outside our room, three feet away from me separated only by an open sliding glass door as I slept face down in my la senza G-banger. WHAT THE FUCK.
Ryan called reception to tell them about it and the dude was alarmingly nonchalant on the phone, asking if we wanted to call the police or not. Super weird, but we were totally tired and he just told them to fucking sort it out so he could sleep. And then we laid there like Bart Simpson on the Simpson's Halloween episode with the whites of our eyes blinking in terror in the dark.
At this point I think it's important to consider the hypotheticals:
- Ryan usually sleeps like a corpse, except that he snores loud enough to wake the dead. HOW THE FUCK did he hear that noise (that I slept through) and wake up to yell and scare the bad guy away??
- How the fuck did that sliding glass door get opened if neither of us opened it?? Obviously there would be someone in the room at like 4 in the morning - did one of the housekeeping staff knowingly crack the door so I could get stabbed and murdered in the night??
Aaaanyways, possible homicides aside, we had a good sleep in the next morning, threw a shitstorm at reception and payed $100 for our regular priced $170 room.
Parked the car and headed back to the harbour to check out The Endeavour, the replica of the ship Captain Cook was on when he discovered New Zealand was 2 islands and New Holland AKA Australia was a rad new continent. This is pretty much the cream of the crop for me in terms of historical awesomeness and I relished every single second. Ryan, once again, wowed me with all the questions he asked the adorable elderly museum volunteer tour guides and we had a total blast crawling around the decks.
Walking off the boat and coming down off the Captain Cook high we realized the ungodly heat - overcast but for some reason I was dripping sweat from everywhere. Time for a drink and some lunch.
We ended up picking a snazzy harbourside restaurant called El Toro and had this Turkish exchange student waiter who would come to the table to take our drink order, bitch about the heat, bring drinks and bitch about the heat, bring the food and bitch about the heat - you get the idea. It was so hot my margarita on the ice didn't even dent my overheatedness and when I got up from my plastic chair I found that I left an EPIC PUDDLE OF SWEAT. I laughed and showed Ryan and as we walked away, the Turkish waiter saw it and doubled over laughing with a disgusted cringe. yucky. :-P
As we left the restaurant we saw our ferry to go to the zoo so we ran like hell to catch it - nauseating and super not awesome in the blistering heat with guts full of booze and fish and chips. By the time we got the ferry over to the terminal to transfer to the zoo we decided it was too late in the day and just way way way too fucking hot to go to the zoo so we went back to the car and had an easy drive home singing to Triple J on the radio and eating Milo ice cream treats.
Morals of the story:
1) Don't get a room on the first floor if you can help it, even if you're hot and bitchy and tired, don't take it.
2) Always always always check that your patio door is shut and locked before you go to bed.
3) Sydney has terrible traffic, tons and tons and tons of Chinese people and also at least one potential rapist. It's also home to the coolest Captain Cook experience ever and the Opera House - a mix of real real bad and real real good.
4) There is nothing better than splashing around the pool in Ryan's parents back yard, the dog barking and happy, picking passion fruit off his mum's tree, chucking it at each other and eating it over ice cream while I'm wrapped in a sun-warmed towel, listening to the happy sound of nothing that is Mt Illwara, just outside of Wollongong. Did I mention I really really like it here??
