Green Gardens and Blue Mountains

So in Sydney, there are lots of parks and gardens. It's very refreshing, seeing as it's all in a huge bustling city, and you get huge patches of green. Across the street from my apartment, there's Victoria Park, a couple blocks behind my apartment, there's Wentworth Park...yada yada. Well, about a fifteen minute walk from my house there's a Chinese Friendship Garden, and not knowing what it was, I decided to visit it earlier this week.

First, allow me to present to you: Australian schoolgirls.
Don't they remind you of Madeline, from those books you used to read as a kid?

Anyways, the inside of the park turns out to be like any other Chinese garden I've visited, although I can't say for sure if this one seemed more cluttered, or if I have simply grown since last visiting a Chinese garden. Nonetheless, it's pretty, and it was definitely kind of interesting to look around this peaceful garden and then look over the hedges and see a huge Novotel in the background.

In any case, I took my time around the garden, and then left. To my surprise, I can walk quite easily from the garden (which was only a short walk from my house) all the way to the Rocks and then Circular Quay (home of the Sydney Opera House)!

So there I was again, at the Sydney Opera House. I had tons more time today, because I like to saunter around town on my own, and so I took an abundant amount of photographs (as if I hadn't already the other day), but I'll just share one.
It was a pretty cloudy day, and so the opera house stood out a little more in black and white than in normal coloured pictures. I'll visit the inside of it someday. Supposedly, you have to go in the morning if you want to see backstage, or else rehearsals cause them to stop the tours.

This is the Customs House. I'm not really quite sure what the cultural significance is of it now, but it used to be the first Customs office in Sydney (duh, the name).

Inside there's a library, and some art exhibit that I found quite interesting. They're only showing six of a set called "The Regal Twelve" by Alexia Sinclair. It's based on the stories of twelve female monarchs, and they seem like collages of photographs and the like turned into a single picture. From what I saw, some of the stories are a little simplified, but it was definitely a fun thing to look at.



The last few days, I've been gone in the Blue Mountains, Katoomba more specifically. The Blue Mountains are about a two-hour train ride east of Sydney, and they're gorgeous!
Supposedly, they're called the Blue Mountains because of a fine mist of evaporated eucalyptus oil. However, it was rainy and cold the few days that I was there, so I didn't see the blue haze that gives the mountains their name.

It was super misty throughout the day, and the fog was really thick, so visibility at one point was about 10m.


In order to see anything, I decided to go below the fog layer. Which meant climbing down the Giant Stairway. When they say Giant, they mean Giant. That thing was so scary, being that it was unbelievably steep and extremely slippery. Let me help you picture how steep it is. I was standing on a step, and if I reached my arm in front of my face, I could touch the step that was level with my head. So I was holding onto the railing for dear life both going up and down.

When I finally got back up, the fog had cleared enough for me to see The Three Sisters. Quite beautiful, no?
They remind me of the Grand Tetons. Maybe not, it's been a while since I last saw the Grand Tetons. Either way, national parks in Australia are quite different from those in the States. For one thing, there's no entrance fee. Secondly, their visitor centres consist mainly of a little shop, not so much an exhibit like most national parks in the do. It's like the title of National Park is simply imposed upon a pre-existing town, community, area, rather than a parcel of land being set aside as a National Park and having only certain businesses within its boundaries.
This is Katoomba Cascades, which eventually lead to this:
Katoomba Falls. I was on the Scenic Railway the second day when I took this picture. It's kind of hard to tell just how big this waterfall is in the picture, since it's an aerial view. But it's humongous.

Instead of the Giant Stairway again the second day, I took the Furber steps instead to get to Jamison Valley, to the rain forest. I wonder if all rain forests look like this. To me, this shot looked like the prototypical rain forest shot, with all the vines and stuff.

Anyhow, for the next week or so, I'm back in Sydney, and am busy with orientation and the like.

I miss you guys!