After six months of being here, I'm finally getting the chance to meet up with a few people from back home! Last Saturday, Lily (friend from Husky Band) was visiting from Melbourne for a few days, and I got a chance to meet up with her at the Botanical Gardens in the city. We walked around a bit and made our way down to The Rocks, the oldest section of Sydney. We started at the Hero of Waterloo pub, which has been operating since the mid 1800s. It's a pretty cool bar with live music and a lot of history, and no TV or pokey machines (somewhat rare in Australia) so you actually have to talk to the people you go drinking with. There is a dark, dusty tunnel that runs from the cellar of the pub to Sydney Harbor which was apparently used to smuggle rum out to the ships. Legend has it that there was a trap door next to the bar, and if someone became too drunk they would suddenly be dropped through the door, dragged through the cellars, and would wake up the next day as a newly (involuntarily) recruited sailor aboard a ship.
Lily and I had a really good time, but unfortunately an extremely intoxicated redheaded guy decided he was going to have a chat with us. We spent the next 20 minutes or so messing with him (I told him that my name is "Gwyneth" and that I'm a dancer with the Australian Ballet), and ended up fleeing to an Irish pub for one more drink before I headed back to Cronulla.
Here's a picture of our last drink of the night. Lily is on a working holiday visa like me, but she's been in Oz longer so she has to head home in a month or so. Rochelle and Stephan are arriving on Monday at 8 am and I'm already getting excited to see more people from Seattle! I'm taking the day off work to meet them at the airport and show them around a bit before heading back to work on Tuesday.
