Saturday, January 26th, was Australia Day. This celebrates the day the First Fleet landed in Sydney Harbour. Most locals call it "White Australia Day" because they feel it is just the white Australians way of celebrating taking the land from the Aboriginals. Again, so much hostility between the two sides still to this day. Anyways, it is a huge celebration and the main reason I stayed in Sydney for this long. I wanted to experience what all the hype was about.
So the day started off with me getting up at 6:30am for a run around the city. Rebecca and I stayed at a new hostel (big mistake - I will blog on that later), so I ran around starting at Darling Harbour and did a 6-mile loop around the harbours and city. It was finally sunny!!! But also extremely hot. It was nice though to see all the sights in the sunlight.
After a shower and quick breakfast, we headed down to the Harbour Bridge to watch the Ferry Races (what a great view from along the bridge walk). The harbour areas were packed with families, tourists, young, old, you name it. It reminded me of a 4th of July celebration in America. After the Ferry races around the harbour, there was a boat parade with all these decorated boats. We just walked all over town and people watched. It was funny because people were "tailgating" all over the place. We felt a little out of place because we didn't have our "picnic baskets" and wine or beer with us. We had no idea what to expect, so we didn't bring anything but water and snacks (oh wait, Matt had his Johnny Walker water bottle too!) A lot of people were already drunk by noon - including Matt! He thoroughly enjoyed the holiday - any reason to party...
We had lunch at a Pizza parlour in "The Rocks" and got a table by the window so we were able to people watch even better. By the way, the pizza was awesome! As this was only my 2nd meal in a real restaurant, I was astounded by the service - they take your order, give you your food and then you don't see anyone again until you finally wave them down for more drinks, water, or your bill. I guess that is why no one tips.
After walking around for a few more hours and checking out all the festivities in the parks, I headed back to my crappy hostel to back up my things and get ready for Sunday morning (I had to leave the hostel at 6:00am for my flight to Melbourne).
Later that night, we all met up for drinks at Dock's on Darling Harbour. We hung out for a few hours and waited for the fireworks show. They had this huge presentation with boats, kayakers, singers, speakers, etc. Finally around 9:15pm, they had a spectacular fireworks show - better than any I have seen in the US.
A couple of the people around us found out we were Americans and had a really fun time with that - couldn't believe we would be out celebrating Australia Day. I think they were all pretty drunk though so they probably found a lot of things funny that night.
I got back to my hostel around 10:30pm and headed to bed. Unfortunately, the rest of the city did not realize this and were awake and loud in the streets until around 4:30am - needless to say, I didn't get much sleep that night.
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