Day 2

Our "first full day" anywhere tends to be hyper-active and today was more-or-less so. Hilit by a 4 hour walking tour by Matt, a native "Sydneysider" who was stereotypically friendly and charismatic. Since I know y'all are history buffs, allow me to fill in a very very few corrections to the extremely vague Australia back story, courtesy of Matt:

Everyone knows that Australia began as a place for the UK to dump its convicts. This was the plan from day one - as opposed to having a small colony and deciding to turn it into an open air prison, their first major arrival was 11 ships and 800 convicts. At the time UK had a plentiful supply of convicts in part due to high crime levels in part due to returning soldiers who couldn't find work in the UK. Most were there for fairly minor crimes and on a 7 year sentence, but as the colony improved, it became more attractive to just stay permanently.

FN relations (slightly interesting that they use the term FN, I don't think USA does) were basically good at first but the first civilian governor (Macquarie, Scottish) had a "if they don't like it shoot them" policy.

"New Zealand is a beautiful country. Australia is not a beautiful country. It's a harsh, barren country with a few beautiful places" [such as the Blue Mountains which is not on our agenda - I slightly regret this].

As for Sydney, a few superficial observations: y'all know it's enormous, around 6m people, and seems nice enough. Quite hilly. In the touristy bits that we saw, tons and tons of massage parlours; very few coffee shops. We took public transit, which was great - like YYZ, they take credit cards, which is a huge plus. Public bathrooms that we saw were high quality and free. I think they have a metro but did not use it.

I got up to run at 6 AM and the beach here (Bondi) was already very very busy with surfers, swimmers and, of all things at 6 AM, people playing beach volleyball. The whole thing felt like the most Australian thing ever.

A pint of beer is a$16 which about c$17 (but that's in Bondi, no doubt cheaper in less tourist centric places). Crazy expensive but minimum wage is $25. Oh, and NO TIPPING. Awesome. It's just not a thing here. It feels so nice just knowing the price and paying and not f'ing around with the percentages and such. First world problems.

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