Bondi Junction.

The past couple days in Sydney have been fantastic. The first night I shared my room with a girl from New Zealand. The hostel was the nicest city hostel Ive stayed in. We went down to the pub for dinner and ended up staying for the trivia night. I was no good because I could barely understand the hosts accent and I know very little about Aussie pop culture, politics, and historical figures. It was fun anyway. There was also a paper airplane making contest and I did pretty good in that. I didnt want to win though because the priye was two buckets of vodka and that was the last thing I needed.

The next day I went and got a badly needed haircut. It turned out great. Ive decided to grow it out a bit and every time I do that I end up liking the next short haircut. After that I went all through Sydneys Chinatown, checked out the markets, and went to see Wicked. The show was absolutelz fantastic. The lighting and costumes and sets were so incredible. The lead actors were great. All of the songs were awesome. To be honest, I had forgotten how much I love the story. Its just so clever and interesting and makes so many comments on politics and society, but its just funny at the same time. I might even read the book again. Actually, there is one book by that author I haven't read yet, so maybe Ill look it up.

Today, I took the ferry through Sydney Harbour and out to Toranga Zoo. I had another fantastic day. The zoo is all about education and conservation. The enclosures are great, I went to see the open flight bird show, the seal show, the penguin talk, and the chimp talk. They were all very well done. They are actually building a lot of new exhibits too. I think Ill have to come back some day because I didnt get to see a platypus and they are opening a new Tasmanian Devil complex which the proceeds of Wicked are supporting through their Green is Good program.

I took a ton of photos at the zoo. I even made a couple little movies. The very first exhibit I saw when I came in was one of my favourites, the red pandas. This one was active, but there were also several lazy ones sleeping in the trees.

I also really loved the echidnas, little Aussie porcupine=like creatures. This one is confused about where his nature area is located.

After the zoo I headed back to the hostel, picked up my pack, and hopped on the train out to Bondi Junction. Its the town in behind Bondi Beach. I have two friends from the Uluru tour who live here and they are letting me stay for three nights. This is really generous of them because they don't have a whole lot of space and they work very late hours. Right now I'm using their housemates computer. Hes Czech, so this keyboard doesnt have anz apostrophes. The y and z keys are not only reversed, but they are doubled, so you can use both keys to type either letter. Also, all of the words on this computer look like theyre from outerspace. For example, this is how you say New Tab = bez názvu. I could get by on the French one, but here I just have to guess and try to remember where the commands are on the list becasue I dont have a chance to find them otherwise. O well, at least it isnt a Mac.