Holiday–part 2 Sydney Australia…

Monday 10/25/10 - So our first morning in Sydney started with a morning stroll over to Paddy's Markets which is an interesting mix of shopping mall meets Asian market with everything from nice dresses to a fish market and a Chinese grocery store.  Then we headed through towards Darling Harbor which is where you will find lots of shopping and oodles of fine dining establishments along with a few pubs as well.

From there we headed to Sydney’s casino only to find out we couldn’t carry our backpack in so we considered this an omen and headed out of it… After passing through the casino in Sydney we decided we were energetic enough to continue our walk on to Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens.

The Royal Botanical Gardens are a must visit sight for any traveler to Sydney with spectacular views of Sydney Harbor and the Circular Quay area. Along with the beautiful flowers and trees there are even some very interesting residents, about 200,000 giant fruit bats or flying foxes that make these gardens their home.

From the gardens we headed to Circular Quay. Getting hungry we stopped at Smiles Meat Pies to try an Aussie meat pie.  Tasty but a bit too messy! After lunch we walked around the Quay and then headed back towards the hotel through the Central Business District or CBD. Here there were lots of old architecture meets new architecture and there were lots of people dressed in business attire moving hurriedly from point A to B.  No one looked particularly happy…

After realizing we were tired, thirsty and hungry we headed through Sydney’s central business district and we stopped at a local pub called the Three Wise Monkeys Pub where we stopped and sampled some Aussie beer and some yellow tailed snapper fish and chips. The Bank of Australia's 'Southern Branch' was established on this site during 1879 and was some type of bank until until its closure in 1998. After sampling a Toohey’s and a XXXX Gold we decided to head to the hotel and crashed at about 9:30 pm Sydney time.