A Map, Whales, North Head and my first trip to the city

Firstly I am a visual aid kind of a person and I would be frustrated not knowing where things were in relation to each other. So here is a map with currently important landmarks on it.

North Head

Yesterday Zappa went off to help a friend called Rob with the doing-up of his boat (apparently he's been doing it 7 years but the launch date should be in about 6 weeks). On the way (to Rose Bay, see ye mappe), on the ferry, he saw a whale!!! I am so jealous. I looked up Whales at Manly Beach and there was a little site about them, (http://members.ozemail.com.au/~russo/whales/whales.html to credit the pictures to them, what a responsible blogger I am), and the picture sequence of this seemingly attention-seeking whale made me laugh. Like so:

Alex shows his tail

Alex shows off to a ferry

Alex just gets bloody obnoxious about it

 I might have changed the last one. But that's how I read them and it made me laugh.

So. I was on my own for a day, and after lazing around reading a book and cleaning out Jebediah the fish, I thought I should probably do something interesting, so Woody and I went to North Head, a nature reserve type thing with nice views. A guy gave me his parking ticket as he left saving me a sweet $8, and we set off, Woody catching the scent of all sorts of sporting-smelling creatures and getting very excited. Including this bizarrely black rabbit:

 Woody chomping at the bit after seeing said rabbit

 

The views were indeed rather gorgeous:

 

We had a look at different views for a while, then decided we'd had enough and started back. Except I couldn't remember the way back and got sort of lost in the bush. I mean it wasn't proper jungle but I think it definitely counted as bush. I walked through an unmanned spider's web and Woody very nearly ate a huge black specimen of Sydney's fiercely protected water dragons - this picture I took the first time at the Bower but just to illustrate:

That would have been slightly bad... Eventually we made our way back to Dingo and managed to give the all-day ticket to another nice bloke. Yayy. I'm a little concerned cos the ticket inspector guy saw me do it, wrote it down and then went and called someone...hope it's not illegal...

My First Trip to the CITY

Today we went into Sydney Proper on the ferry!

 We took the train to Hyde Park (I think over half the road and place names in Sydney are borrowed from London) to see a bit of Art and About, an annual event in Sydney where art is taken outdoors:
"The idea was to transform our city into a canvas, to create a living gallery on our streets, with work that would make Sydneysiders stop, think, laugh or smile…." (http://www.artandabout.com.au/)

Then we had a brief wander about before settling down to read in the shade of a tree in the park.

After that we started off to find a vegetarian cafe where we'd read there was some live music, couldn't find it, walked for miles, I started collapsing, so we dragged me into a nice bistro type thing and I had the BEST burger and 2 whole cokes and I felt explodingly happy and decided it was the best day EVER. God knows how I'm going to feel tomorrow but I survived and was full of glee.

 We've got a week's ticket for everything - ferries, trains and buses. So we'll hopefully venture in a few more times this week. Now it's time for the RUGBY FINAL! (I've gotten into it). Can't wait - I really like watching the French play cos they're all zip-zip-zip WOO (can't believe Tonga beat them - I wouldn't have thought sheer size would matter that much at a world cup level but hush ma mouth!). And the All-Blacks are just legendary. Should be a good game.