Day 187 - Exploring Sydney's CBD (Central Business District)
/With the Christmas excitement and festivities behind us, today we decided to head out into city center with my Aunt Sheema to see some of the famous landmarks.
In so many ways Sydney reminds me of New York City. They are so similar, yet so different! The CBD area made us think of a much, much nicer version of the South Street Sea Port. The weather was nice and warm and we decided to just take a stroll from Darling Harbour to the Opera House.
On the way, we saw a couple of Australian Aboriginal street performers dancing and playing the Didjeridu, which is a simple wooden tube that is blown with the lips like a trumpet. "It gains its sonic flexibility from controllable resonances of the player's vocal tract." It may not look like it but apparently playing one is a very difficult task!
Alas, our eyes were able to feast upon the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. How cool! Though at first Hannah was in no mood to take pictures, as apparent by the first photo below, we still got our required family pictures and can officially say, "hey look, this is proof we were there!". The Opera House is truly a remarkable piece of architecture and I think most pictures out there, including the ones here, actually don't do it justice. You can get tickets for a tour for about $37 for adults and $20 for children. The family price for 2 adults and 2 children over 5 is $95. We skipped the tour, as we actually had no intentions of spending that kind of money on a tour of an Opera House, but I would be curious to know if the tour is worth the money. Have any of our readers been inside? Is it absolutely magnificent?
After spending some time by the Opera House, we grabbed some ice cream for the kiddos and headed back to Darling Harbour. This time, instead of walking, we decided to take the ferry.
The ferry system in Sydney is remarkable, probably the best ferry system I have seen anywhere! I love that you can use the same transit card for ferry, bus, and train... NYC really needs this system! I suppose it makes up for the not so awesome/reliable bus service. We got a great view of the the Opera House and the bridge as the ferry took as back to Darling Harbour.
We ended up grabbing dinner at a fast food Mexican restaurant and headed back home, since the kids were tired and really wanted to get home to play with their new Christmas toys.
Artists hard at work! Hannah is missing in action!
Back at the house, all the kids had fun drawing and coloring for a while before it was time to get ready for bed.
I think tomorrow we are just going to stay put so the kids can have plenty of time playing with toys and watching some TV :) As a family we are all so TV deprived, it is actually a bit comical! The other night I pulled out my laptop to catch up on some posts and made the mistake of sitting in front of the TV. I couldn't take my eyes off of the pretty moving pictures! I ended up closing my laptop!