Last Saturday (the 8th) was our last day staying with Viive and Ian before moving into our own place. To celebrate, they took us out to dinner and to see some of their favorite spots around Sydney. We went to dinner at a really great Indian restaurant and shared four dishes between us. I hadn’t completely realized how awesome the food here was going to be, but it makes sense. My theory is that the quality of food is inversely proportional to the distance from its origin, that is: the closer you are to where the food originated the better it is. Australia has amazing Thai and Indian, and I’m sure the Indonesian, Japanese, and Chinese is going to be just as good. We’ve just been so excited about the Thai, that we haven’t gotten around to trying much more.
After dinner, they took us to a beautiful park called Balls Head. It is on the north side of the Sydney harbor with a lot of wonderful trails through the bush. The trails are maintained, but not overly so making the park feel wild even though its in the heart of a large city. There are cliffs and caves and tide pools all carved out of the sandstone that the park sits atop. It makes for wonderful walks with excellent views. Enough talk! More Pictures!
Apparently there are all sorts of little caves throughout the park.
A view of the same overhang from the other side. The pillar is man-made, probably to keep it from collapsing.
And during certain times of year, you can have make fires in the park!
After the park, we went to a Coney Island-like midway/amusement park called Luna Park. I’ve never been to one, so it was pretty fun to see. Apparently it used to have two roller coasters, but then more residential buildings were built in the area and the residents complained too much. Ahh, the perks of being rich. Currently it has one roller coaster, a ferris wheel, a games midway, bumper cars, a big building labeled “Coney Island”, and some other attractions I can’t remember. Pretty cool place, and it’s along a really beautiful section of the harbor (seems to be a theme…) We didn’t take time to ride anything, but it was fun walking through and seeing it. 
The park has big brightly lit entrances, so you can’t really miss it, and is across the harbor from the Opera House. Since I was there, I couldn’t help but take a picture.
I apologize for the layout of the pictures in the post. It’s really hard to get WordPress to do it the way I want it to.
