Thanksgiving Down Under

This past Thursday I boarded a Virgin Blue flight down to Sydney to celebrate the Thanksgiving weekend. My co-worker Caryl went along with me as well.

After checking into our hotel, The Vulcan, and laughing at how small the rooms were we set out to explore this capital city of New South Wales, Australia. 5 hours of walking later being lost for 4 of those hours had us seeing most of the sights that makes Sydney famous.

Our main goal was to find a restaurant that would be serving up a helping of turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. After searching high and low we realized that although there are alot of American tourists and companies in Australia we were not going to have our traditional Thanksgiving dinner. To make matters worse the restaurant we did pick undercooked my barrimundi fish fillet and overcooked Caryl's steak. Luckily that was the worst of the weekend. The rest of it was great.

On Friday we set off to the Aquarium at Darling Harbor and then took a Sydney Harbor boat tour. On Saturday we didn't let the clouds and mist stop us from boarding a bus and heading over to Bondi Beach. After a 30 minute bus ride we arrived at Bondi and as we arrived the sun arrived too! We lucked out by having a great sunny day to check out all of the sights at Bondi. On Sunday we boarded a sightseeing double decker bus and took a 90 minute tour of Sydney. This was a great way to learn about all of the historic places in Sydney.

The Opera House was the scene of the Australian Idol finale on Sunday night. We were trying hard to see if we could take part of the event by scoring some tickets but we had no luck there either. At one point a producer came out to the crowd with a handful of tickets scanning the crowd to see who would be lucky enough to get in. I thought that this would be my chance. I went up to him, seeing the golden tickets only inches away, and asked if I could have two for my co-worker and myself who were over from Boston. He looked at me up and down, and very politely said in his thick Australian accent 'Sorry mate, you don't have the right look'. As I walked away dejected I saw him hand out the tickets to young teenagers and 20 somethings who were dressed to the 9's. I started to laugh to myself thinking that the guy could have said 'Hey mate, you are way too old'.... LOL!

My next flight will be to head back to Boston on December 14 for two weeks to celebrate Christmas with my family and friends!