Weekend walk to Circular Quay and beyond

Sunday was supposed to be rainy, so before the weather turned bad I headed out for a morning walk. I didn't have a set destination in mind, so I decided to see where my feet would take me.

Up on to the bridge...

Across Circular Quay...

Towards the Botanic Gardens...

Somehow all these flowers are still blooming even though it's officially winter!

Around to the Chief Secretary's Building...

And finally back across the bridge to home!

And I balanced out all that walking with a trip to Lord of the Fries with T later in the day. Don't want to be getting too healthy! =)

He was obviously not so happy about be taking his picture.

Yay for lazy Sundays!

 

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Me + Vivid = True love forever

This is the last weekend of Vivid, which is very sad news. So on Friday night, I walked over to the Rocks and down to Luna Park to make sure I could soak up as much Vivid goodness as possible while it's still here!

There were lots of greats of little light installations tucked around the Rocks.

One of my favorites was this interactive display where you could make a symbol with your hand and it was displayed on a wall with all the other people's hands.

My other favorite was this display where you could walk under glass bottles that were lit up and hung from scaffolding.

There were also these cool guys walking in silence and not blinking. So cool!

Another high on my favorites list was this walkway, which was supposed to give you the feel of walking under the Aurora Australis.

And besides all my favorites, there were tons of other cool spots.

And my walk back to our side of the harbour was just as good.

There aren't too many lights on our side of the bridge, but like last year, people can choose the colors for the bridge.

It was an awesome evening - so many lights to love!

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Getting more British all the time!

The lovely Adele had a birthday this week, so on Sunday we went to high tea to celebrate!

 

This high tea place was different from the one we went to a few weeks ago. It had a more homey, country feel to it. The settings weren't fine china, but cute little matching patterns instead.

 

The food was just as good as the Gunners Barracks but in different ways. And I have to admit, I'm really starting to like the whole scones, cream, and jam combination! I wasn't sure what to make of it the first time I had it here, but I'm really starting to see the appeal!

 

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Nighttime activities

Last week was full of after-work activities!

There was, of course, Vivid on Monday. Then we were on to more social activities: dinner with a high school friend of Toby's who was in Sydney with her family for the week. We got to meet up with them twice while they were here!

The first night we had dinner in McMahons Point, and we got to see the Vivid lights from the north side. The second night, we had dinner in the Sydney Tower, which is one of those rotating restaurants with good views of the city.

We got there in time to see the fireworks show in Darling Harbour. And Vivid lights of course!

The other nighttime activity of the week was a 24 hour coding contest at work. So it was a late night of hanging out with geeked-out developers, working on our pet projects, and trying to get ready to present to the whole company the next day!

It wasn't just grueling work, though. There was a snack cart for an energy boost and a resting area:

And, of course, countdown clocks to keep us on our game.

Here was my crack team showing up Friday morning to hammer out the last three hours.

We did pretty well in the competition - we nailed Round One and came in really high in the semi-finals. Can't complain about that!

We closed out the week with a birthday celebration for Esther. In true Spanish style, we started eating around 7 and kept on going until about 9:30. There was tons of food and it was all amazing.

When you do a birthday celebration with expats, you sing the happy birthday song in English, Spanish, French, and Dutch. Luckily we got through all the versions before the candles caught the cake on fire!

It was a really full but happy week!

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