A house in Sydney...

Aloha! Here some more on how I am doing in Australia. First of all, I just found a room, which is nice. I will be moving out of my hostel and into my room on Monday. The room in located in Leichhard, an Italian neighbourhood about 10 minutes from the city centre and university by bus. For 150 dollars a week I will have a small room in a student housing facility. It comes with a bed, a desk, a closet, internet and breakfast: just about everything you need. It was formerly run by the academy of music, but now by the church next door. Because of the fact that it is ran by the church you are not allowed to drink alcohol on the premises, but I can live with that as it is clean, quiet and relatively cheap.

Besides looking for a room I visited the NSW gallery, the botanical gardens and the Opera House. The gallery was good: located in the park and with no entry fee it is definitely worth a visit. They show a collection of modern art from the European renaissance up to contemporary Australian. While the European renaissance collection was not as nice as you can find in Europe, the contemporary Australian collection had a few surprisingly good artists.


The Royal Botanical Gardens were very cool. The gardens are large, with great greens, very cool Australian plants, great views of the city skyline and harbour There were also some cool birds flying around and big bats hanging in the trees. The Opera House is located at the end of the botanical gardens. It was nice to see, but I found that it looks better from afar than up close.


More pictures will follow on my Flickr account, listed and linked below, in a while. Cheers!

Chinese newyear in Sydney

Hi, today is the Chinese Newyear celebration here in Sydney. We are now entering the year of the rat and because of that there was a parade through town. It is organised by the Chinese community, but it seemed that a large part of the population came to watch. The parade had carts with all kinds of animals, dragons, marching bands and a lot of dressed up Chinese people.

After watching the parade we went for lunch in the park and then went see the Chinese garden. This was a very feng shui like thing with nice ponds and waterfalls in it. The garden was larger then I expected and had a lot of tourists in it.

To finallize my sightseeing I went for a walk along the harbour bridge. This is the largest bridge in Sydney and was quite impressive and nicely built. From it I had my first view of the famous Sydney Opera House, which was about time as I've already been here for three days.

Tomorrow the introduction at UTS will start. I hope that it wont last to long, because I would like to go to the beach.