The other thing I really missed this trip was my smart phone for using Urbanspoon and Yelp to help me find good restaurants. I tried using the internet in the room to search their sites for good restaurants, but I couldn’t get Sydney to come up using either site. I had to settle on TripAdvisor, which I now believe to be somewhat suspect. The first restaurant we tried was Lucetta. My wife’s chicken wrapped in prosciutto was dry, but she was hungry and didn’t want to wait for them to recook it. I had the gnocchi with red sauce and bacon, and it was pretty tasty, but not as tasty as my typical restaurant recommendations from US or Yelp. The Verizon smart phone I carry in the US is issued by my work, so I couldn’t throw the $25 for 100Mb data on it as I would a personal phone.
The next day we took the ferry to Manly, which in my mind is a must do, if only to get a feel of how extensive the harbor is.



Quite impressive. And $7 each way per person. We got to the beach and there were a HUGE amount of people dressed in costumes.



I asked whether this was normal, and was told this is an every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday thing. Then the guys I was talking to came clean and admitted they had paid $25 to be in a charity costumed raft race. People were riding waves with little school buses and on bed mattresses! They were having so much fun! I really enjoyed the spirit of the event.
We went back to the room for a break and then took a tour of the Sydney Opera House. Got to see the 2 major halls and the playhouse underneath and hear the tale of the competition and the results. The Opera house tiles are a lot more yellow with patterns in them than I’d thought. I thought they were just a really white white.