Journal brought to you by Sophie

Tuesday 13th March

Today cannot even be really counted as a day. Tamara and I were the laziest people on earth. You will not believe what time we dragged ourselves out of bed. 9 I hear you say. No. 10? No. 11? No. 12? No. 1? YES. Yes we slept in until one o’ clock in the afternoon. We even missed the free breakfast and you know what we are like with free food. Talk about wasting the day. Anyway once we had got out of bed, which was so unbelievably hard (I blame the jet lag) we discovered it was actually quite a grotty day. It had even dared to rain. How could it? Despite this we set off in high spirits (Tami made me take off my rain coat because she was so embarrassed to be seen with me in an anorak) and decided to go on a rather scenic route through the Royal Botanic Gardens to explore Sydney. As we rounded the corner of Mrs Macquarrie’s Chair (Mrs Mcquarry was the governor’s wife and her husband ordered workman to carve her a chair into the stone at her favourite look out point over the harbour) we saw a fantastic sight. The Sydney Opera House. I tell you it is one of the most spectacular things I have ever seen (a lot smaller than I originally thought) but still an absolutely incredible piece of architecture. We took several shots of it then walked to it in order to book a tour for the following day. After this excitement we continued on to the aquarium. I preferred this one to the one in Cape Town (I think) although we only spent 1 and a half hours there instead of the 5 ridiculous hours in South Africa. It is way more touristy but it has loads of cool things in there and it just seems to be set out better. Although I was very annoyed because the touch pool for seals wasn’t open and we had missed all the feeding times but that was our own fault. This aquarium rated highly due to the fact that it had cool underwater tunnels that could be explored. Tami got very excited because there was one underwater tank that was filled with sharks and the like and you could see them up close. There was also this absolutely massive ray in there. I couldn’t believe how big it was and then I read a sign which said that due to the glass they were actually 25% bigger in real life. I could not believe it. In fact I don’t beliiiiiiieve it. (See what I did there? You know Victor Meldrew? No? Ok then that was wasted.) Tami has taken a very good photo of a shark and his teeth but it is too slow to upload pictures here so I am afraid you will have to wait in anticipation. We also saw some cute little penguins and many many fish as you would expect. There were pink ones and green ones and yellow ones and etc. We also saw all of the Finding Nemo crew pretty much including Dory, Marlin, and Gil. It was very exciting. (Sophie you would have loved it – unless you are no longer a diehard Nemo fan). In one of the underground tunnels I had the fright of my life when I saw this giant thing with a huge open mouth resting on the ceiling. Absolutely no idea what it was but it was a biggy. There was also very large eels and some really cool jelly fish. I think it would be great to be a jellyfish because they always looked so relaxed floating about. After the aquarium we simply went back to the hostel and cooked dinner. Sorry people – we are actually being very very boring here in Australia and not jam packing our days. I think we just need to wind down and chill for the next couple of weeks so don’t expect mega exciting stories. Sorry! We are still missing you all loads though and think about you everyday. Lots of love,Sophie xxx