Capoeira

Last Sunday we went to see the Brazilian Capoeira Festival at Darling Harbour. It was a bit boring at the beginning, but it slowly grew to become very entertaining. It was actually a tournament for beginners and the grand prize was a car! All the participants were non-brazilian who had only been doing capoeira for 6 months; this is what got me interesting in taking the capoeira course, and I think I'll be starting next week! Here are the pictures.

Jerome's Birthday

Before I got my apartment I stayed for a week in a Backpacker's hostel where I shared a room with Jerome (right in the picture) and other people. He is from France and has been living in Australia for a year now... it was his 25th b-day so we went to some pub to celebrate. He's very funny! Has the funniest remarks!

The girl in the picture with him is Carolina from Colombia; I met her during one of the arrival sessions at university. She studied Electronics Engineering at Los Andes in Bogota and now she is doing a Master Degree in Audio Design. She was the one who helped me set up my apartment, thank you very much!

City Skyline

Although this photo doesn't have the best quality, it has a lovely composition and that's why I post it here. I took it from the ferry.

Taronga Zoo

Now, during my second weekend I went to the Taronga Zoo so I could see all the Australian animals. I managed to see all of them except the Dingo! It's not that they weren't there, it's just that I couldn't find them within the zoo. They also had Snow Leopards which are very very rare (I couldn't take a good picture really) and a bunch of other animals from around the world. The best thing about the zoo is its location; across from the Sydney Harbour with a fantastic view of the city, the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge. The pictures that I took of the animals are here.

Sydney Aquarium

This is a typical Australian joke. I thought it would make a perfect picture for a post on my blog and so... here it is! During my first weekend here, I also managed to make it to the Sydney Aquarium, It seems it's one of the places with the most aquatic species in the world, they have something like 14000 creatures! Here are the pictures.

Around Sydney

The first Saturday I was here, I took a ride on the hop-on hop-off double-deck bus to go see around Sydney. It was a very interesting ride, but I got a terrible sunburn because I was on the upper deck of the bus the entire time! If you go to this photo album you will see more pictures of the Harbour Bridge like the one above, the Opera House, Bondi Beach, Queen Victoria Building (QVB) which is actually a shopping centre but it looks like some kind of government building, Town Hall and others. The information on the bus was very interesting and I got to learn a lot about Sydney's history and culture.

Darling Harbour

This is one of Sydney's main attractions. There are many restaurants, bars, stores, etc, but just the setting and the place are beautiful. Most festivals are held here and there are always events going on both national and international. The great thing is that I live literally no more than 100 metres away from Darling Harbour, so whenever there is something happening I can just walk 2 minutes and see everything. Again, there are more pictures in this album.

University of Sydney

This looks like a postcard I know, but it is actually I picture I took myself and it's the Quadrangle, the oldest building in the university. Currently I am taking 4 classes: Foundations of Entrepreneurship, International Risk Management, Cross-Cultural Management and Transport & Logistics Economics. Three of those classes are in the main campus, but the transport one is in a different campus not far away; I have to take the train to get there though. There are around 48000 students that go to school here... a lot more than what I was used to in Miami where we only had about 13000. I don't know what else to say... there are more pictures here if you care to see them.

The Apartment

I found my apartment by luck I suppose. I just looked up ads on the newspaper for property rentals and the first one I saw I called and voila , I'm living here now. This is a picture of the front of the building, but if you want to see the inside you can go here for more pictures. The apartment is close to everything; about a 30-minute walk to University, 2-minute walk to Darling Harbour and 10-minute walk to the city centre. It;s on the third floor of the building but there is no lift, so bringing all the stuff up the steps was quite tiring! I like it very much and I already equipped it with everything a house needs i.e. microwave, vacuum, TV, etc. There is one glitch though, there is no air conditioning and as it is summer right now it can get very hot some times, so I had to buy a fan for my room just not to melt at night.

The Map

Australia has 8 states and Sydney is in New South Wales (NSW). Since the territory is so vast, the climate, land, fauna, etc is very different depending on where you are. Sydney's average temperature during the summer is 25C and during winter it drops to about 10C. It's the perfect weather really, and it doesn't rain too much either!

First Day

Why not start with Sydney's most famous landmark? There it is! The Sydney Opera House. I took this picture while traveling on a ferry coming back from the Taronga Zoo. Ok well, that's it for this post, I just wanted to give a start to this blog. Enjoy!