Sydney day 1

I'm not really sure if this truly is day 1 or not because we arrived at the airport at 11:30 a.m. on FRIDAY and arrived to Sydney at 9:30 a.m. SUNDAY, so maybe Day 1 and Day 2 were lost on the plane somewhere but this is my first day in Australia so let's just pick it up there...

After getting off the 15 hr flight over the Pacific we found our bags and said goodbye to Claire, the person who sat next to us on the flight and thanked her for not being one of the screaming children that were spread throughout the plane cabin. We jumped into the taxi with a very disgruntled taxi driver (that halfway to our hotel literally did the sterotypical-taxi driver thing involving rolling his window down to yell at someone) and reached the hotel to drop our bags off.

We walked over to the Darling Harbor (it being Sunday morning there wasn't much open) and walked the pier at some outdoor markets and eventually landed ourselves at the Sydney Opera House. It is definitely as cool as it has appeared in all the pictures, Discovery Channel episodes, and History Channel episodes I've always seen.

We decided to take the ferry that went out to a few different harbors, mainly just to get a water-view of the Opera house. At the last harbor drop-off we exited the boat and went exploring around a little Island and found some pretty amazing cliffs and look-out points. We took some video and photos and hopped back on the ferry back to the Opera House's harbor.

Now that it was lunch time we decided to opt out of the $15 tourist-trap lunch "specials" and just grab a couple Aero bars and Coke Zero and hit the walking trail once again.

Talking to locals is one of my favorite things to do, (especially if they have an accent) and ask them for some suggestions on things to do. After searching Twitter for people talking about Sydeny I asked about some sporting events happening this weekend and got some suggestions from a few people (@Renas40 @tomatom @carmR).

Set on watching a rugby or cricket match at some point on this trip we decided to head back to the hotel to "re-fuel." We watched the first half of the Rabbits and Roosters rugby match on TV then headed to Maloney's Pub to catch the second half and grab some solid food and drinks.

After that, we headed on down to Darling Pier again as the nightlife was starting to heat up and went to the largest 3D iMax screen on the planet (so I'm told). This screen, which we were limited to only watching an hour-long surfer movie starring Kelly Slater because Alice in Wonderland was sold out, was 8-stories tall! Pretty incredible.

Now, as the sun was going down we took a very long 45-min (very long because we had been walking all day after getting very little sleep after traveling 26 hours) down to the Sydney Opera House again to get some night night footage. That was a great idea. After that we headed back to the hotel and hopping in bed at 9 p.m. sounds lame but when OKC is at 5 a.m. the day before, I felt justified in closing the eyes.