sydney: beaches, film festivals & lots of walking!

it's sunday morning now and we've been in brisbane for around 14 hours. i haven't really got to grips with anything here yet so there's not much i can say except that it's warm and they are in a different time zone to sydney and melbourne. oh and we've hired a car so that's made a change! we've hired a car because we will be doing quite a bit of driving while we are here. but anyway, i want to blog about the rest of our time in sydney not our plans for the next few days up here...

last week in sydney we did lots of walking. we really saw the city by foot and it was lovely. then we saw the coast by foot too. which was also lovely. i did swim a bit too which was also lovely but got a bit burnt which wasn't very lovely. on thursday we walked through the huge botanical gardens and saw government house, mrs macquarie's chair and had a good look around the art gallery of new south wales. 

then we took a quick detour from our walking tour to add in some sydney festival fun to our day. our chosen festival show was a piece of interactive art called 'the very near future', which was a maze of rooms to walk around designed to portray a film noir in the making, which we eventually found ourselves becoming part of - pretty impressive! after that we made our way to hyde park barracks and for a quick look around the beautiful queen victoria building shopping centre. for a drink we went in search of the baxter inn, a secret prohibition era themed whisky bar, which we had to locate purely by street address and going round the side and back of a building and clambering down some stairs into a basement. at 5pm the candlelight bar was packed and in full swing. unfortunately it was a bit too dark to take a decent photo but if you search for images then you will see what i mean!

on friday the whole day was spent at bondi beach as we had tickets to flickerfest in the evening, a film festival happening over a number of weeks in sydney (and then touring australia i think). when we arrived at bondi the beach was pretty packed.

we walked along the coastal path to tamarama beach and onto bronte beach where we had a little dip and a lay in then sun. then we had lunch before heading back to bondi. the path was just beautiful with some truly stunning beaches and scenery.

that evening we went to flickerfest at the bondi pavilion, to see a selection of international drama and comedy shorts, where we snacked on beer and popcorn whilst enjoying the great variety of short films. it was a great evening and a really good ending to our time in sydney.