I'm back

Hi.  I just spent my 11th birthday in Sydney, the largest city in Australia.  I got to see the Sydney Opera House from the Royal botanical gardens.  You can see it across the water from the gardens.  The Sydney Opera House was built on 1957 and was designed by Jorn Utzo from Denmark.  It took a long time to build and was opened in 1973.

For my birthday dinner we went to the Meat and Wine Company.  It is a really good meat and wine restaurant.  Mom ordered kangaroo and I tried it!  It tasted sweet but was tough.  

The next day, we took a train to Leura, a little village in the Blue Mountains. We took a cab from the train station to the hotel.  The next day we took a bus to Echo Point, home of the Three Sisters which is a huge rock formation.  The bus driver told us a story that the Queen visited in 1954 and wanted to hear her echo.  They did not want to disappoint her so they put three women in the valley to return her call, in case the echo didn't work.  They didn't need the women because it echoed perfectly. Then we hiked down into the valley on the Great Staircase (1,000 stairs!).  When we got to the bottom my legs ached!  We walked through a rainforest to the platform where we got on the steepest train in the world.

The Three Sisters from Echo Point.

1,000 stairs.

These are pictures after fire set by local firefighters so that the plants will regrow. When the fire goes by and hits the acorns of some trees, the acorns open up and the seeds fall out.  This is how the trees have survived over thousands of years to tolerate fire.