A long one... sorry!

So much to blog about, so little time. Since I wrote last, I have seen and done so much more that it will be difficult to write about it all, but I'll give the highlights, and vow to not get so behind on blogging again. On Monday night after my internship, I killed some time, got some pizza, and then went to go see A Midsummer Night's Dream preformed by the symphony, choir and actors. It was a unique version, which was fairly enjoyable, but I enjoyed The Magic Flute better.

Tuesday and Wednesday I just went to the internship and then crashed here, did homework, etc. They are such long days.
Then, Thursday, I set out to do my interviews for my online class. I chose to interview people at the ANZAC memorial in Martin Place, which is where I get the train from every day. It was really interesting to get to talk to people, and the first two people I asked were willing to do the interview, so that was fantastic. And then, my iPod totally froze, and I could not fix it. So I decided to not stress out, and I would just come back the next day to finish the interviews. After grabbing a delicious crepe, I decided to make the most of the day, and explore the parts of the city I hadn't seen yet.
First, I headed to Hyde Park, passing the Sydney Hospital on my left and St. James church on my right. The park was really beautiful, and I would love to go back there and just read for a day. After leaving the park, I discovered that the building I had been taking pictures of was in fact St. Mary's Cathedral, which was on my list of places to see.

It was beautiful, inside and out.

After giving myself a tour of the cathedral, I headed to the Botanical Gardens again, to explore it some more. When I went the other day, I knew that I had only gotten to see a small portion of it; turns out I hadn't even seen most of the "garden" part.

I took tons of great flower pictures, of course, and was happy as a clam. I have decided that if I could be paid to take flower pictures, I'd be pretty happy with my life.

I love the signs at the gardens: "Please walk on the grass. We also invite you to smell the roses, hug the trees, talk to the birds and picnic on the lawns." And if I wasn't happy enough, then along came two cute little girls and their mom, stopping to drink from an intricate fountain.

I saw thousands of species of plants and flowers, many that I had never seen before in my life.

And then -- my worst nightmare. For those of you who know me well, you know that there is practically nothing that could ruin a day of taking pictures of flowers and cute kids. Nothing, of course, except for the beings of my worst nightmares -- BATS. I heard a bunch of sqwaking, and looked up, expecting some sort of exotic, colorful bird. Instead, HUGE fruit bats, hanging from the trees.

Not only were they huge, and ugly, but they were flapping, sqwaking, and occasionally flying at 4 p.m. Broad daylight. Bats. Hundreds of them. It took all of my personal restraint not to scream, or run, or cry. I just took pictures of them instead. And then I started taking some more pictures of flowers. And then, another worst nightmare. I found about 4 spiders in webs on my walk.

Not as bad as the bats, and much more photogenic, but still, quite scary. By this point, I was a little disoreinted, and wasn't quite sure how to get out of the park. A guy asked me to take his picture, and we got talking, and he headed me in the right direction. I headed back home, calling it a day.

Friday, I headed back into the city to finish my interviews, ran into some iPod trouble again, ran to the Apple store, had them reset it for me, and then interviewed the rest of the people. The interviews were all really interesting. I ended up talking to one guy who was a first fleeter, meaning his family came over on the convict ship, at the very beginning. After I finished my interviews and a little shopping (2 zip-ups for $4.95 AUD EACH!), I headed back to the ACU North Sydney campus for class. Our class, which counts as a 3 credit Lit class, that day included a walk across the Sydney Harbor Bridge, complete with John snapping pictures of random people, a tour of the Rocks, a visit to the oldest pub in Sydney, the Lord Nelson Hotel, and dinner at a different pub, where I had chicken snitzel, which was fantastic.

Saturday, I spent the morning working fast and furiously on editing my podcast, and then met up with Isabel and Petra, my new foreign friends, to go to the Mardi Gras. We took a detour through Circular Quay to kill some time, and got some pics with the bridge.

Mardi Gras was a spectacle. It is the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, and everyone comes dressed up in crazy outfits.

We waited forever for the parade to start and tried to find the best place to stand so that we could actually see. Isabel's friend, Kim, met up with us, along with two Colombian boys. They also had a friend there, who happened to be wearing an Adirondacks t-shirt... what a small world! Sunday morning, I woke up early and headed to the train station for our Blue Mountains trip. I'll save that story for the next post, because it's getting late and I have the internship tomorrow. I'll write more and add pics to this post later!