So my first week in Sydney is over and before I move on I thought I'd try to write a bit of an update in here since it's been a while. This week was crazy! Really intense, but it ended up being a lot of fun. I did a one week tour/ orientation thing called Ozintro with a bunch of other people my age, mostly from England. We did loads around the city..Monday we went jet boating on Sydney Harbour which was so fun/ so terrifying, and had a mini tour of the city. Tuesday we went to this wildlife world place where we saw kangaroos and koalas and tons of spiders and things which was pretty sweet.. Wednesday was our learn to surf day. The weather wasn't great so the water was pretty cold, but it was still good (although I'm a horrible surfer and couldn't even get up on the board..) Oh, but we could see dolphins swimming not too far out in the water which was so amazing! Thursday we went to Bondi beach and had a BBQ and mostly lay in the sun all day, then we had a talk with the guys from Ozintro to try and figure out what to do after this week is over which was really helpful. Friday we went hiking to the Blue Mountains which was AMAZING. The weather was perfect and the views were actually breathtaking. Everyone was pretty tired after that so we had a quiet night and watched tv and movies back in the hostel. The weekend was so much fun. Some of us went shopping in this awesome market in central Sydney to buy some costumes for Saturday night since we were all going out together to some clubs. Sunday we went out for dinner in the Sydney Tower, which is this huge revolving tower that has amazing views of the whole city. Right as we were finishing dinner, fireworks started going off above Sydney Harbour. It was so perfect for our last night.
A lot of the people I was with decided to stay at the same hostel this week, but I wasn't crazy about it and wanted to see more of Sydney so I moved to another one right in the city center. I was kind of nervous moving on on my own, but the girls in my room were all really nice. It's great all the different people you meet when you do something like this - one was from Holland, one from the Canary Islands and one from Switzerland. I'd also made friends with a few British people on Saturday night who are staying at the hostel next to mine, so I've been meeting up with them. Tonight we're all going out for one of their birthdays. So that's about it so far... In terms of later plans, I'll probably be heading to Melbourne later this week or early next week and I might pop over to New Zealand for a week in December. Also, I'm going to be taking a scuba diving course on Magnetic Island which is up the East coast in January, which I'm really excited about! I'll try to update again sometime in the near future.
