DAY 5 - BLUE MOUNTAINS

Today we started our day with a long drive to the Blue Mountains. They are certainly not as big as the mountains here, but they are incredibly blue (something to do with all of the eucalyptus trees). We stopped at Echo Point in Katoomba, which is a little lookout point swarming with tourists. It was pretty cold today, especially up in the mountains, but we were so glad that we got to see them. We took the small hike down to the Three Sisters, a famous rock formation (like Delicate Arch or something) and took some pictures. You can hike down past the Three Sisters to the floor of the valley, but the "hike" is really a set of rickety stairs carved and/or bolted into the mountainside. It is called the 1,000 stairs, and is literally over 900 stairs, so we walked about twenty of the stairs and decided it was enough.

We made the long drive back and ended up in Cabramatta, one of Tyler's areas in his mission. It was like entering another country; Tyler always told me Sydney was more diverse than Americans thought, I had no idea it was such a melting pot. It was like walking around the corner and boom, you're in Vietnam, it was so crazy. It took us forever to park, but we managed to find a spot and get out to explore. We went to a corner bakery and bought red bean pastries; somehow, Asians use red beans as a dessert, like a jelly donut filling, and it tastes just as sweet. We looked at some shops and then went to Happy Cup, a store that sells teas and fruit juices with all sorts of mix-ins like tapioca pearls, jellies, and other weird things. They vacuum seal the top and then give you a super fat straw that you pierce through the seal. The straw is fat so that you can suck up all the chunky mix-ins. It was a very entertaining drink.

After Cabramatta we made our way to the Olympic Park. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it was really just a bunch of buildings that were dark and vacant. It was fun to see all the sculptures and Olympic-esque signs and buildings. We grabbed a small bite of McDonalds (that seemed to be the only thing open) to eat while we walked around. One of the streets was lined with tall trees, with street lamps interspersed every four trees or so. As we walked beneath the canopy there was rustling and squealing in the branches. Tyler told me they were bats swooping out of the trees; the street lamps were attracting lots of bugs, a late-night feast for the bats gliding into the beams of light to grab them. I flipped out, these trees weren't that tall and I didn't want anything to do with them. Tyler just laughed at me, but on the way back to our car to head home we crossed to the other side to watch them from afar.

This formation is the Three Sisters. We thought we should get some selfies with the Three Sisters in the background behind both of us. Apparently we can't even stop being silly for like two seconds.