This may be a bit of a boring post b/c I'm really tired right now and i don't remember everything i did but here goes - I went to the airport in Sydney for my flight to Melbourne but my flight was delayed for a long time so rather than just wait in the airport and miss the whole day, I asked if I could be put on the same flight the next day (which they did for no fee) and I went back to Sydney and spent the day there. I was kinda tired because I woke up at 5am to make the 7am flight. Additionally, since I had planned that Mon would be my last day in Sydney I had seen all of the big tourist things, so I decided to go to some gardens that they have near the opera house which turned out to be a good move. It’s a huge park, maybe the size of central park? I have no idea, but really large. Anyways, in each area of the park they made it look like a certain country. So in one area they have all trees from Africa, the next is Chinese plants etc. It’s cool that they can pretty much grow every tree b/c of the tropical climate there. What I found really cool about the park though were the birds, which I haven’t mentioned yet. The birds in Australia are insaaaane. First of all, they are gigantic. They have parrots that look like dinosaurs and another bird that is everywhere in Sydney is one of the ugliest birds I’ve ever seen that’s probably 2 feet tall with a beak that has to be a foot long. There was a kid walking with his mom in the gardens yesterday and the kid started to run at the parrots to try to get them to fly away but these birds were so huge (and the kid was only 2 or 3 yrs old) that they just stood there and looked at the kid with an expression of… “Really, you’re going to chase us? We’ll destroy you” and right before the kid got to the birds, the mother grabbed the kid and stopped him, but for a second I got really excited and thought we might have a kid massacre on our hands. Despite the insane diversity of birds, there are no land animals that I’ve seen here yet and I wonder if that’s the case throughout most of Australia other than the kangaroo/koala, probably b/c it’s an island that’s so far isolated from the rest of the world.
Also, I forgot to mention this in my previous post, but I found the most amazing Chinese bakery (I didn’t even know Chinese cuisine had bakery-like stuff?). They have every type of roll you can imagine and there’s always stuff in the middle. It is amazing. I don’t even remember what I ate but everything had either red bean curd, pineapple mush, coconut or custard in the middle of the roll and they were all sweet, basically like cakes. I went there for dinner on mon night and for all 3 meals on Tuesday which leads me to my next thing… the Chinatown in Sydney is awesome. It is way different than any other Chinatown I’ve ever been in as it’s not crowded and it’s really clean. The only weird thing is that as I walked down the arcade to get to the bakery, all the women from the restaurants stand outside and yell at you to come into their restaurants and literally say things like “hey sexy, want a $5 fried rice?”. When she started with – “hey sexy, want a $5…” I was wondering where she was gonna go with it, but I guess that’s just how they try to get your attention there.
I got to Melbourne this morning and walked around the city a little bit and was somewhat surprised by how much smaller than Sydney it was. Sydney feels like a really large city with a nice sized downtown and big buildings lining the streets, but Melbourne has a relatively small downtown area and a much more relaxed feel to the city. Also, Chinese food is the thing in Sydney, but sushi is the thing here, the rolls are $2 each which is awesome, but they’re also served as hand rolls, not like the cone-shaped ones in America, but just regular rolls that aren’t cut into 6 pieces. It makes it so easy to eat as you walk since you eat it just like you would any candy bar. It is awesome. Melbourne is beautiful and clearly would be an awesome place to live. I think Sydney may be a better place to visit although for a lot of the afternoon I’ve been hanging out in my hostel b/c I woke up at 5am 2 days in a row and got no sleep last night b/c my hostel was so disgusting and really loud. I’m trying to plan out where to go after Vietnam and I’m thinking Laos but it’s hard to get a flight to shanghai from there without a 20 hr stopover in Kunming. Has anyone been/know anything about Kunming and if there’s anything to do there?
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