Finally Rested!

July 17th

I think I slept about 12hours, and it was probably the best sleep ever since I finally go to sleep laying flat rather than upright in a plane seat. We were all suppose to meet up around 11am and make our way to the Aquarium at Darling Harbour. The 5 of us that were on the late flight managed to make our way to the mall down the street and found a Target and get the things that we wanted to the night before. I was surprised to see how pricey things were here!! I needed to get shampoo and conditioner which was $6 a piece and then I ended up buy a pair of yoga pants and they were $35 !!! for Yoga Pants! but it was better than freezing my butt of like I did wearing my shorts the day before.

 The first thing that we got to see upon entering the Aquarium was a real live Platypus! haha It was really hard to see though due to the fact that it was really crowded and there were kids everywhere! I also realized at this point that the night before, I had taken the chip out of my camera to upload photos to my computer and forgot to put it back in my camera! So the amount of pictures I could take was limited (my favorite one is at the top tho!). There were a couple different opportunities to walk through tunnels that were under large tanks that had sharks, manatees, sting rays and of course Doris and Nemos! What I really liked though, were the different displays that had lots of coral and tropical fish, it just got me more and more excited about getting to scuba dive in the Great Barrier Reef in a few weeks!

After taking our sweet time getting through the aquarium, we were quite hungry so those of us that were left decided to get some food at a place on the harbor that looked decently cheap, and as an added bonus there was live acoustic music :) Stephanie and I ended up ordering potato wedges, which apparently come with sour cream and sweet chili sauce...and its delicious! This is apparently something common in Australia and it reminds me of that dip you have around christmas with some sort of chili sauce poured over cream cheese. Oh, and their ketchup is called tomato sauce and tasted more like bbq to me or someone else said Canadian ketchup.

Now that we were all filled up and ready to keep going, it was time to head off to Paddy's Market. I kept hearing how I should wait to buy any souvenirs here because they are a lot cheaper; and low and behold they were! lol I wasn't really sure what to expect when we got here though, and I must say, it was quite overwhelming. There were different venders set up side with not much space to move between them and all of the people that were making their way through. I definitely need to make my way back to this place. I was able to get some things for some people however, since I was a bit overwhelmed I felt as if I just needed to get some ideas and then make a list later of all the people who would be lucky enough to get something from me haha. I managed to get myself a zip-up hoodie that says Australia and has their flag on it, along with a bag that has Aussie like things on it for really cheap!

Once we managed to make our way through the chaos, we decided not to head back quite yet and just wander around a bit. We found various fountains and took some pictures but didn't really do anything imparticular. Then it was time to see if we could figure out how to get back to our dorms via train, since this was our first time figuring it out on our own; we didn't see, to have any problems tho. We were hoping that when we arrived back at the dorms that we would find our luggage waiting for us, but we were quite disappointed to find that it was STILL in Dallas!? So once again, I am stuck washing my underwear in the shower...cool.