Nobels and North Shore Hike

On Tuesday I was already feeling better, and since it was raining Carla and I decided to go the UTS to check out Beautiful Minds Exchibition. It had been in the main lobby for the past couple of months but I had never taken the time to take a closer look at it. The exchibition was about Nobel prices that people had won over the past 100 years. It had came from somewhere Europe and UTS was its only location in Australia. To be honest, it was nothing special and we spent only some 15min looking around before heading to Bulga to drink hot chocolate with Till and Denise :)

Beautiful Minds Exchibition

Later that night NignNign had a party. The original idea was to have a girls-only party, since Carlos is the only guy left in flat 6 (some people are moving out already), but it ended up being just a general Geegal party. People were drinking all sorts of stuff: pear liquor, tequila and sake. I drank only tea, but ate tons of cake, chocolate, licorice and chips (and felt so sick afterwards). We were just sitting in their loundry room; chatting, taking pictures and being silly, and more people kept showing up. The funniest moment was watching everyone´s faces drinking shots of sake (Japanese alcohol) because they so really strongly disliked it! I headed to bed right after midnight and the rest of the party didn´t go on much longer, either.

Darkan, Nign Nign, Andrew, Denise, Carla, I, Claire, Shinae and Ricky at "Girls Night"

When I woke up on Wednesday it wasn´t raining :D It´s been raining here almost every day for the past weeks, so no rain is always good news. Since Carla is leaving back to Holland in a couple of weeks (snif!) she had gone through the Lonely Planet to find out some last things she still wanted to do in Sydney. One of them was a North Shore Hike, along the coastline on the other side of the bridge. We took a train to Circular Quay and started walking towards the Harbour Bridge. But on our way we spotted a mall and this souvenir shop inside of it. The shop was having huge closing down sales, and we ended up spending over an hour there! I found two cool photographs of Sydney to hang on my wall when I go back to Lappeenranta (and hopefully find an apartment there), a handcrafted hairclip made of eucalypt and two pots made and painted by Aboriginal Australians. All of them were at least on 70% sale! After such intense shopping we felt hungry and decided to have lunch at this cute cafe we had seen on our way to the mall. So we walked back there and ate delicious prawn soup before having a second try getting to the bridge.

The cute cafe at the Rocks

We crossed the bridge, took some more pictures of the Opera House (I´ll end up with thousands of them by the end of the year!) and started the walk along the coastline. The beginning of it was actually just in some posh neighboorhood, but we enjoyed looking at the houses. I seriously would consider settling down in Sydney someday if I had a good reason to (which would be either a job or a man, I guess). Even though we had our Lonely Planet it was a bit hard finding the right streets so I think we ended up walking more than the recommended tour. The best part of the walk was seeing Sydney from the other side of the water. It got dark while we were still walking, so we got to see all the city lights, which was beautiful! I don´t know why, but ever since I was a kid I´ve been amused by the silhuette of city lights of a big city at night. Maybe it represents something vibrant, ever chaning and exciting to me. Anyways, the end of the walk would´ve been a return trip to Mosman and back since the last ferry departs from Taronga Zoo. We decided not to walk further since I had gotten dark and pretty cold already. So we took the ferry and bus back home. We made "Pancakes in Geegal" (inspired by the popular restaurant Pancakes on the Rocks). I made the mix and after discovering we don´t own a whisk ended up breaking all the flour chunks with my fingers, which took forever. It was worth it, though, since we had such a delicious pancake dinner with vegatable and fruit fillings, watching House and Medium.

Sydney

Sydney at night