Greetings from Sydney!

I am finally here in sunny Sydney!

The plane journey was LONG! I would definitely recommend stopping somewhere on the way as 26 hours is a long time to spend travelling! I set off from Manchester airport at 8:15, landing in Heathrow just after 9am. I boarded a Qantas A380 plane to Sydney via Singapore at 12:05, got to Singapore at 00:41, had an hour an a half to freshen up then got back on the plane and landed in Sydney at about 10:20 (19:20 Oz time!)

I was pretty impressed with the A380 plane. It was huge! Having only been on 747s for longhaul flights I think the A380 is better. The seats seem slightly bigger and recline quite far. There’s a decent amount of leg room (though I am short, so if you have long legs it might be a problem!). One of my favourite things about the plane was the self service snack bar. I only used it to top up my water bottle and got the occasional can of coke, but it meant that I could have a drink whenever I wanted without having to bother any of the flight attendants! The food was also pretty good, especially the beef in black pepper sauce with fried rice – yum! Another great thing was the entertainment screen, there was a massive choice of films, tv programmes, music, games, you could check the news and weather, watch destination guides, check where the flight was, and even view the take off and landing with the tail camera. I only actually watched one film, Due Date, it was pretty good. I was also pleased to see that there were 14 episodes of Mr Bean, so watched a few of those! But I mostly took advantage of the huuuge range of music albums and created a playlist which included: Avril Lavigne, Green Day, Savage Garden, Shania Twain, Nirvana, and the Wizard of Oz, Jungle Book, Phantom of the Opera and Cats soundtracks, and quite a lot more! So I listened to that for most of the journey. Only managed to sleep on the final part of the flight but at least I got a bit of sleep as I wasn’t expecting any!

Anyway, enough about the flight! I’m now sat in my dorm room typing this as a word document so I don’t use up internet time writing this, not sure what time I’ll actually post it. I’m staying in Sydney Central YHA which seems really nice so far. It’s clean which is the main thing!

I got up this morning at about 7am so after showering, breakfast etc was out in the city at 9am! I decided to head straight to The Rocks as I’d read about a really good market there, but as I was about to discover, very little is open on Good Friday in Sydney! Even the tourist information was closed and the only other day it closes is Christmas day! So I decided to have a look in the Museum of Modern Art which was quite good, there was a photography exhibition on which you had to pay for, so I didn’t bother with that, but I looked at the rest of the collection. Then I did the touristy thing and took a load of photos of the Harbour Bridge and Opera House! The weather was so warm and sunny so my photos all have a lovely blue sky! I then strolled through the Botanic Gardens where I saw lots of interesting plants and trees with bats in them!

My next plan was to go to the supermarket to get some food, as surely the supermarket would be open on Good Friday? Turns out it isn’t! So I had to go to 7-11 (kind of like Spar or Londis) to get some expensive orange juice, and didn’t bother with food! For lunch I went to a food court in the shopping centre above Paddy’s Market. It’s pretty reasonable, you can get a meal for between $6 and $15 (£4-£10). I then had a quiet walk through Chinatown then decided to come back to the hostel at about 3pm as I was tired!

Not sure what I’m going to do tomorrow, probably head to the supermarket first thing, then might go back up to The Rocks to see the markets!