Vacation Days 1-2: Sydney

That's right, folks, we spent our Christmas vacation this year on a 14 day cruise around Austrailia and New Zealand! It was entirely too much fun. On December 22nd, we left Sasebo and took a bus to Fukuoka. From there we flew to Narita airport in Tokyo. We had a long layover, so we took the subway to the Hard Rock Cafe for dinner. Then we flew all night, arriving in Sydney around 8:00 on the 23rd. The ship was still unloading from the last cruise it took, so we spent some of our morning sitting on the docks looking at this:

And this:

Oh! And this:

Once we were allowed on the ship, we dropped off our things and ran straight back out into town again to see what we could before dinner. We walked to the middle of the harbor bridge (but not up to the top because that was high enough for me). We also took a closer look at the Opera House. There was a market going on in the rocks, so we began our shopping too. At dinner, our view was of the Opera House and the various sailboats wandering though. It was lovely.

After dinner, we ran straight back out again to catch a little Sydney night life while we could. We walked as far as the WWI ANZAC memorial, and on our way back wandered in the Fortune of War Pub, which came highly recommended by several of the guys on Zack's ship.

Our second day in Sydney, we decided to hit the aquarium, since we weren't going far enough north to see the Great Barrier Reef. The aquarium has several places where you can actually walk under the creatures, and it was a pretty cool time. Unfortunately, I couldn't get any good pictures of the sting ray the size of my car, or any of the colorful fish through the glass, but here's one of the residents of the aquarium:

After the aquarium we went back to the Rocks for further random walking and investigating, and on Christmas Eve, the Mercury set sail for Melbourne....