Sydney Opera House / Royal Botanic Gardens

On my 10th day in Sydney, we had picnic at the Royal Botanic Gardens, it was an enjoyable trip, had a lot of fun with the birds.

Gladys packed our sandwiches, and as usual, I like to bring raisins to picnics. This time though, Gladys decided to pack the raisins in... ermm... a glove... So we had a glove of raisins. And after filling the glove up, it actually looks like a man. Haha.

We took bus down to Circular Quay railway station, one of the stations where there are quite a few tourist attractions around it.

From this quay, there are actually a lot of ferry services to various places of Sydney, like to Manly beach etc. You can even board a ferry here to go whales watching, but then it's too expensive for us for now.

Luna Park is at the other side, under the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Can't really see it clearly from this picture as it's actually quite far away. Luna Park is an amusement park.

Sydney Harbour Bridge! One of the most famous attractions of Sydney. It wasn't a very clear day, so we couldn't really see the bridge very well.

Usually we find taxis on the roads, but we saw this yellow river taxi that's so cute!

Gladys treated me to Baskin Robbins chocolate ice cream. Mmmm... Dark chocolate ice cream. It was really good. Thick and rich.

Another REALLY famous attraction. Sydney Opera House. I did say that there are quite a lot of attractions at Circular Quay... Honestly, it doesn't look as impressive as it does on postcards and photos. Partly because it's already quite old I guess. And most of the nicer photos of it are usually taken at night?


The quay is full of seagulls that are not afraid of people. Gladys threw a bread crumb down to feed one of them...

and then came more!

As she threw more bread crumbs down, more seagulls came down, and by the time she finished all the bread crumbs, the seagulls gathered at her feet like school children attending lessons, and looking at her for more stuff.

A closer look at the Sydney Opera House.

Finally, the entrance to the Royal Botanic Gardens, which was just beside the Opera House.


The botanic gardens had quite some couples just sitting down, relaxing and enjoying each other's company.

The picnic that we had! The sandwiches were packed by Gladys, and the muffins were from Coles. Sad to say, though the muffins looked quite nice, they don't really taste great.

There was this bird with a long beak that was standing near us, so we fed it some bread crumbs. Notice that it's tagged. Gladys told me the name of the species, but I can't remember it now. It's supposed to be native to Australia.

It's really not scared of people, unlike the ones in Singapore. At the same time, it doesn't get aggressive like the ones in Singapore either. We were saying that the birds here are smarter than the ones in Singapore. They know when to go over to eat the food, and know how not to be aggressive so that people will feed them.

Here, you can see the bird taking the food from Gladys' hand.

And from mine.

Not long after, two more of these birds came down. The food fight starts. Haha.

Later, this small black and white bird came down as well. It looked a bit like a magpie, but I can't be sure. This bird is actually much smaller than the white ones, but it still managed to get some of the food because it was very fast. What it did was to grab the bread crumbs, and then flew some distance away to eat the bread crumbs.


It wasn't exactly a very nice day for picnic as dark clouds soon gathered...

We lied down for a while and also took a photo with the Opera House in the background.

The Opera House DOES look better at night. Haha. But mind you, this was not exactly late at night. It was just about 5pm? Of course, nowadays, the sky is nearly completely dark by 5pm. The days are getting shorter and shorter.

It soon began to rain, so we ran up to the Opera House to hide from the rain. From the Opera House, we had a nice view of the city.

It happened that on that day, there was some FIFA event going on. And they had this screening of some FIFA pictures onto the Harbour Bridge, and it kept changing.



Lightning soon started. Remembering those post card photos showing lightning, we decided to try our luck in capturing photos of lightning as well. We spent a long time there trying to get nice photos of lightning. Luckily, we did manage to get a really nice shot:
And a smaller one.

We actually found out later at night that the thunderstorm caused a blackout in some area in Sydney. Just before leaving, we also took a picture of Luna Park at night.