Finding Nemo

Over the past few months, Siena has learned to like a few Disney movies. One of her favorites is Finding Nemo. Since we were getting ready for this trip, we were pretty open to letting her enjoy the movie, especially since Nemo ends up in Sydney, Australia. Every time it was on we would tell her she was going to Sydney soon too. So once we got to Sydney, it became our responsibility to Find Nemo.

Finding Nemo isn’t too hard if you head to the Sydney Aquarium, and to start day two of our trip, that is just what we did. We decided to walk across town to Darling Harbor. On the way over Siena took a nap so we detoured through the Queen Victoria Building. This historic old building, with a statue of the queen out front, is a really nice spin on a mall. The building is a lovely building inside and out and façade hides the shops inside quite nice if you are looking from the outside in.

As we left the mall, we headed across the street to the St. Andrews Cathedral. It is a very pretty church with beautiful stained glass windows. Siena knew right away we were in a church (she told us that was where we were) and then she proceeded to look around at all the pretty windows.

From there we headed to the Sydney Aquarium. We went in to the aquarium and Siena became our tour guide. Like many aquariums, this one has low, glass faced tanks and full wall glass windows that look in on the fish. When you are 3 feet tall, this is a great thing. Siena went from exhibit to exhibit taking in all the different fish and the platypus (our first native Australian animal sighting). Aquarium highlights included: the shark feeding, seeing giant rays and turtles, seeing lots of different sharks, the glass tunnels that run below the shark and ray tanks and the Great Barrier Reef exhibit. But of course, nothing was better than when we found Nemo. Hiding amongst the anemones, he was initially hard to find, but once you found him he was easy to find again. We also found Nemo’s friends Dori and Gil and Nemo’s dad Marlin. In all, it was a very exciting and fulfilling visit for our little girl.

After we left Nemo and his friends we grabbed a quick Modern Oz lunch at the Blackbird and then went back to the hotel for a quick break. Since we were not yet on Aussie time, we started our day very early, so we had covered a lot of ground and it was just midday. While we were in the hotel room Siena decided to show us what she was learning and looked out the window, pointed and said Opera House. What a quick study she is!

We decided to explore The Rocks area a little further for the afternoon. We headed back down the Argyle Stairs and went to the Garrison Church. It is one of the oldest in Sydney. The stained glass windows here were pretty as well and Lisa captured an emerald green glow around the altar in this picture. Interestingly, we couldn’t see anything green when we looked at it, but the camera kept catching the light in a neat way.

We then headed up the hill to see the Observatory. The Observatory is located on a scenic overlook with a great view of the Harbour Bridge. We spent some time looking at the many telescopes it houses and walked around the hill top park taking pictures. Siena kept pointing out all the boats moving around the harbor below, so we decided to go back down to Circular Quay to see the boats and ferries. We once again got the opportunity to keep our little girl from running head-long over the ledge and into the water. We also stopped at Peter Doyle’s at the Quay for dinner and some ferry boat watching. We had a great window table that looked out on the harbor and Opera House.

After a nice dinner it was back to the hotel. Siena went right to sleep and we enjoyed some fireworks that were fired on top of an office building downtown (yes, it is Tuesday night) while we enjoyed a snack and our view of the harbor below. Day two was another great day.