New Friends

It's amazing how quickly a day can pass by when you're not committed to going to work. Yesterday morning, we went to the bank to get myself an ATM card. The weirdest thing about it was that I got to actually choose what color ATM card I wanted. It was strange that the bank didn't have a standard card color. After the bank, I went running along the beach, which was great. After running, I went walking around the Corso to cool down and to check out prices in the pharmacies. Pharmacies are similar to CVS in the US. Before coming to Australia, we had asked around what was expensive and the 2 products were supposed to be cosmetics and shoes. Well, I am able to confirm that cosmetics are overly priced. A bottle of Revlon nail polish, which is usually around $4-5 in the US is $13 here!

After lunch, I was thinking about actually going out to buy all these paper products that I needed, but my new friend, Nicole, had called me saying that she was going to head over to Manly earlier than expected. She's retired like me, so we usually end up spending part of the day trying to meet up or do something. As I was waiting for the ferry to dock, I figured I'd show our readers an actual photo of the ferry that we take. It's a monstrous ship that holds 1000 people.


I showed Nicole around the Corso before we walked up and down the beach looking for a place to get surf lessons and where we could potentially rent. Apparently, there is only one place that actually provides lessons, so we got the scoop on that and will most likely start trying out surfing in the next couple of weeks.



There's always signs not to feed the birds on the beach because this is what happens. It looks a lot like the seagulls in Finding Nemo.



Finally, this lovely food establishment is almost everywhere within the city and the wharf, which makes me want to try every flavor that exists. They have their standard flavors as well as some interesting ones like Chocolate Chili or American Chocolate (which has a small Snickers bar on top of it to indicate that it must taste like that).


Nicole and I lounged around for the remainder of the day before getting dinner, which was some a "Seafood Snack". It had fish and chips as well as fried calamari and a fried imitation crabstick. Overall it was very good, but I'd probably just stick with fish and chips for the future. The one annoying thing about eating around here is how stingy every restaurant is with their sauces. For the Sushi joints, you have to pay extra for wasabi, ginger and extra soy sauce. At the place we picked up dinner, we would have to pay extra for more tartar sauce, sweet chili sauce (which is used everywhere) and lemons!

Also, on my way back to dropping Nicole at the ferry, we stopped and got some soft serve from McDonalds and yes, the cone was only 30 cents!! Larry, you would be getting them nonstop at this rate. Unfortunately, they don't make them as high as you do. Next time, I get one, I'll try to take a photo so you can see the size of them, but they are definitely worth 30 cents.

Interesting Sydney Fact of the Day: Most of the restaurants appear to be BYO Alcohol. Though the restaurants offer their own selection of wine/beer, it seems that we can actually bring in our own bottles and usually not get charged any type of fee. We have yet to try this option out, but will let you know how it goes.