Our First Day in Sydney

We arrived at the Medina Grand Hotel and checked in at around 9am. We’re staying in a serviced apartment, which means we have a separate bedroom, a fully equipped kitchen and a laundry room. We promptly got ourselves out to the supermarket to buy the essentials – no, not beer and wine but cereals, fruit and juice. We got a couple of mangoes and some cherries, which is great as they are obviously not in season in the UK at the moment and they are my two favourite fruits.

At 2pm we did the 30-minute walk to the Circular Quay. We got the ferry to Manly to meet up with Phil’s friend Tony plus his Wife, Mother in Law and Daughter. Tony is the person that encouraged Phil to go for the job and set up all of the interviews. There is a running joke between Phil and me that he idolises Tony a little bit and, whilst they were working together in the UK, most of Phil’s sentences began with “Tony said”. After meeting him properly I can confirm that he is a fantastic guy and his family are just as lovely. The ferry ride over was great with brilliant views of Sydney Opera House, and the Harbour Bridge. We walked down and met them at Shelly Bay and they’d brought a picnic and loads of drinks for us. We snorkelled in the sea and although my Mum made me promise that I wouldn’t go more than 6 feet into the water, we ended up pretty far out and followed a 3-foot long reef shark. Amazing.

Later, the ladies sat, talked and drank whilst the men barbecued us some sausages on the beach BBQ. Later still, we went on a short walk through the bush and had to duck so that we didn’t touch the masses of spider webs and ridiculously large spiders hanging from there. I’m not exaggerating – they were massive and there were loads of them. We also saw a Water Dragon, which is a protected species in Australia and very cute.

We headed off home at about 8pm and had the most difficult time trying to stay awake on the ferry ride back. We saw the bridge and the Opera House again but this time it was dark and they were all lit up. Just magical.

We’d been planning on drinking the bottle of champagne that we had bought at the airport, but we were so exhausted after being up for nearly 48 hours that we went straight to bed.

What an amazing first day.