Gardens & Towers

Located right next to the Sydney Opera House, are the Royal Botanic Gardens. We decided to venture in and see what we could see. What we found was a vast variety of trees and flowers from all over the world. This is one of the many many Harry Potter trees Sarah and I stumbled across:

 This is the Governor's House:

 

Here are other various things we saw at the gardens:

After our garden tour, we decided to check out the Markets by Moonlight down by the Rocks.  We wandered through aisles of tents filled with hand made products and made our way to the live entertainment.  This week the special guest was Australia's own Ngaiire (the musical guests are of course always Australian). Ngaiire walked onto the stage dressed in a bird like costume, feathers and all. I wasn't sure what to expect from her, but I was very pleasantly surprised. And of course I was sitting there enjoying the music and snapping pictures, only to realize I had left my memory card at home! Yup. Pretty standard. So I apologize for the lack of visual aids, but if you are interested you should really take a listen. It's worth your while: http://www.triplejunearthed.com/NGAIIRE

And here is a sweet pic taken on the way home (with Sarah's camera of course):

On Saturday we headed off to the beach, this time Bronte! Equal in beauty to Bondi, but a bit smaller. We stayed on the sand for a good period of time then indulged in some delicious fish and chips. The fish here is really really good, as you might imagine. Love me some fish and chips!

Every night as Sarah and I sit out on our balcony enjoying dinner and the setting sun, we can't help but notice Sydney Tower on the horizon. As Sydney's tallest building it's hard to miss, and it was calling our name. No longer able to resist, Sarah and I heeded the tower's call and made our way downtown on Wednesday evening and we had perfect timing. Here's what we saw:

After hangin' out for an extended period of time, I forced Sarah to go on this virtual reality ride through the different regions of Australia that came free with our tower passes.  We expected it would be horrible and it was. Not only was the video below par, but the spastic activity of our chairs made no logical sense. Unnecessary roughness.  Sorry, Sarah. My bad. Luckily it was a short ride and Sarah and I escaped with only minor bumps and bruises. Here's Sarah before she had fully realized what she had gotten into:

Oh, can't you just feel the tension in the room? And that was that. More to come in a bit...