So I decided to wander the city a little and see some of the things I had sort of breezed over before. So I took a nice walk into town through darling harbor and went to hyde park. I felt a bit touristy walking around taking pictures, but its a really beautiful park and there were other people doing the same thing so whatever. I like it, its a really nice park and its right in the middle of the city, you can see the sydney tower right there next to it. There is also this really cool fountain in the middle and it looks really cool with all the crazy looking trees behind it (it even had a rainbow in it for the picture). So then right next to the park (on the opposite side from the tower) there is this huge cathedral made of sand stone that was pretty cool looking so I checked that out a little. So then I headed over to the botanical gardens which are in the really big park next to the bay and the opera house (when I took my pictures of the sunset behind the opera house I took them from a peninsula that is part of the park). So one thing I left out when telling you guys about that sun set is what happens right at sun set. I guess that duck sized bats are seasonal visitors to the botanical gardens, and they come in the thousands, there are crazy amounts of them. But to the south is all city and so at dusk when they head out to feed and stuff they go towards the north which sends them out right over the water where I was taking the pictures and so none of them came out in the pictures but there were probably hundreds of them in the field of view of each of those pictures, it was pretty amazing to watch. But I guess they are damaging the trees in the gardens and so they are trying to do things to encourage the bats not to stay there but they were pretty cool to see. Their screams though are pretty awful, even during they day they were like fighting over position on the tree and screaming it was kinda crazy, but cool. So my day at the botanical gardens was quite educational, I learned about the first european settlers and how bad they were to the aboriginals and it kinda reminded me of our struggle with the native americans, except that it seems that the australian gov has done a little more to reconcile that the US has. So in that educational time I checked out the tropical center which had stuff about the rainforests and stuff of australia and there were some pretty cool plants and facts. The whole botanical garden had a lot of cool info and facts (although there were a few misspellings on thier info board things and if I noticed them that probably means there were way more that I missed). So then I headed out and walked around a little more, saw some really amazing trees and stuff and then i came across this open area with all these parakeets everywhere (and they were freaking big, you can't tell from the picture but they were bigger than crows). But it was cool because there were like 50 of them just walking around on the ground like digging things up to eat i guess and they weren't really afraid of people at all and so all these people were getting like right up next to the large grouping and getting pictures, but I ran out of pictures on my camera so I just got these 2, but imagine like 50 more all in a clump in a field. So that was my exciting day of wondering the parks and learning about australian history stuff.

So I went on quite the excursion to the zoo. I started off around 10:30ish to walk in to circular quay where I could pick up the ferry to the zoo, but I decided I was going to try to do it without using my maps, because I always love a challenge. So of course in my head I pictured the placing of it not quite right and after walking for quite a while realized that I was not in the right spot. Luckily however I knew where I was and with a little tiny bit of help from a map I knew what my error was and how to fix it, so around 12ish I finally got there. I had caught the 1240 ferry over and although I was running later than I wanted to be it was alright. Spending time on the water in the harbor is awesome, its always beautiful and so although I was in like a big ferry and only on it for about 10 min I enjoyed that a lot. So I got there and there is a lower entrance and an upper entrance, and what everyone does (because you can do it for free) is take the gondola over the zoo and go in the upper entrance after the ferry ride, so I did it. So I get into the gondola and this naturey crunchy looking couple gets in and then this family of 2 parents and a son that looked to be about my age, and the son is wearing a red sox hat and so I am immediately excited because all you see here are yankee hats, like every 5th person has one. So I turn to him and say "so are you a red sox fan?" turns out him and his parents are from brookline and staying in sydney for 3 weeks to site see, and the crunchy couple was from maine and spending a year travelling, they have also been in sydney for about 3 weeks and were in new zeland before that for about 6 months. So we all chatted about new england and coming here and how the yankees suck ass. so that was exciting, sorry for the paragraph with no pictures, but I thought it was note worthy.

So continuing with my zoo excursion, I got there and its a pretty big zoo that is somewhat maze like and the maps suck, so that was a little annoying, but they have koalas everywhere, so I took a picture for all you guys who wanted me to. Now you may have noticed that I am standing next to it for all of you who wanted me to get pictures with me in them. The zoo here is really good about getting people right up next to the animals, I guess since they are very docile creatures and all they let people go in and get close, and they have all these walk through things with kangaroos and stuff where the animal can literally walk up to you if it wants to, although it probably won't, but that was really cool, so it cost me 3 bucks to be able to do the koala thing where you have a "koala encounter" of course mine was asleep, when I walked by it earlier it was eating and stuff like that but oh well. So I did the kangaroo walk through thing and it was really interesting reading about them (the big type can jump 7 meters in a single jump, you do the math). There were also wallabies and an emu in the walk through so that was cool too. There was also a thing where you could get up close to this little animal that looked like a giant rat (that's what the settlers thought it was) but its a marsupial, and this porcupine type thing, but I didn't shell out the cash for that, but here is a guy that did. Ok it was just a leg and i should have just lied and said it was my leg huh? So what I am realizing about Sydney is that unlike boston, where things are just kind of built wherever, everything here is placed with extreme care to maximize its beauty, so the zoo is right across the harbor from the city and the views are amazing. The whole way through the zoo you could see the city and the opera house and such in the background and it was really nice. It was kinda cool to see sydney behind the giraffes and elephants, but they moved before I got a picture. So then as I was walking through I found the birds that I saw in the wild when I was out in orange and so here is the other cool looking bird that I saw. So on my way back out I went through the kangaroo walk through again and it was feeding time for the kangaroos. But there was this one kangaroo in the corner who was looking at something but it looked like he was peeing in the corner so i took a picture cause I am a sicko. So finally after wondering the zoo for a while I decided I would try to beat the rush out, but I was unsuccessful and the ferry was freaking packed. But I got a really nice picture of the harbor. So that was my day, and as a whole it was a good excurtion, although it would have been better if I had had someone to tell all the things i was thinking at the time, but oh well. It was a really really nice zoo but my 2 complaints were that it is a maze and the maps suck so its hard to find your way around or to try to hit as many things as possible in a slightly efficient way, and two some of the people there did not have good zoo manners. I saw a few people knocking on glass, there were lots of kids trying to make animal noices and get the animals to do something, I saw 2 different people feeding animals when they definately should not have been, and this one kid around my ageish was making all americans look bad by lighting his lighter all the time in the dark night time exhibit to try and excite the animals so that he could find them or mess with them and he tried to hit a duck and was being really noisy when the sign clearly said be quiet. Ok done for now