Before I dive into all the activities, let's have a little note about my birthday. I wasn't expecting anything when I woke up because Sydney is 16 hours ahead of Atlanta and New York, but people had already sent me e-cards, emails and notes on Facebook. It was great. Thanks to everyone who remembered and sent their wishes. Special thanks to Jenn who sent a very nice card to me in my luggage. It was great to open it up on my actual birthday.
Anyway, to pick-up where we left off with the last blog, Thursday was a beautiful day in Sydney - sunny and about mid 70's. Couldn't be better. The aquarium was pretty awesome. Check out some pics below.
We saw the crocs first - you know every croc I see looks fake because they stay so still. However, no one should ever be fooled by this because this is how they get their prey. They stay still and then WHAM and strike. Side note: an easy way to tell the difference between a croc and an alligator is that with alligators you can see both top and bottom teeth, but with crocs you can only see the top set. I mean hopefully you won't ever be close enough to notice this, but I just thought this was some cool trivia.
We also saw nasty eels and jellyfish, and we also saw some Nemo's in an actual sea anemone (just like in Finding Nemo). Tim got some great pics.
Next we saw Dugongs, which are close to being endangered and have a 13 month long gestation period. Back in the day the pirates and sailors often mistook Dugongs for mermaids, which explains the mermaid myth. Another interesting tidbit is that Dugongs are closely related to elephants, and similarly, you can tell how old a Dugong is by looking at his tusks. Another few pieces of trivia for you!
Lastly, we went into the shark area. Now this was absolutely amazing. There were tons of sharks, sea turtles and rays. Tim, of course, got some pretty awesome pics. I also learned that the scary looking shark in this tank (sorry forgot the name) is also almost endangered because people mistook it for a man-eating shark. However, it really only eats fish and is relatively harmless (I mean don't go up wanting to bounce around with it, but you know what I mean). Sharks in general really don't like people and shark attacks normally only happen when sharks mistake humans for food...particularly surfers for sea lions because of the splashing about.
So after the aquarium, some lunch and a small walk around Sydney it was already time to head to the airport for our flight to NZ. Sydney was awesome, and we both certainly wish we had more time to spend there. We will just have to go back, I guess!
So our flight to NZ was fun. I can't go into too many reasons why because I will then go into "un PC territory," but just know there were some interesting characters on the plane that caused havoc and ended up in our same hotel in Christchurch.
Ok - so the plane was amazing. Who knew? It had, by far (better than the Song plane down to Miami for my bachelorette and better than the plane to Hong Kong), the best in flight entertainment. Movies, TV, games, travel documentaries on NZ and the best one of all...literally hundreds of albums and you could make your own playlist. It was great. And, Diane and Madeline, you will both be happy to know that Mika and Lollipop were on the music options and the song was on both mine and Tim's playlist. YAY!
So, because our flight to NZ was on my birthday and NZ is two hours ahead, I essentially lost two hours of my birthday. )-: Well, to make it up for it, Tim and I decided to celebrate until the clock struck March 6 in Hawaii, and since Hawaii is 23 or 24 hours behind NZ I essentially celebrated my 27th birthday for a few days. We didn't really do anything to celebrate for two days...except I maybe got my way a few extra times.
OK - this is a ridiculously long blog, so I am closing out now. Read the next one for details on NZ.
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