Saturday, March 08, 2008
Sydney Australia
From January 28th to February 12th we went to Australia and New Zealand. My parents, Naomi and I went. In Australia we just visited Sydney for a couple days on the way to NewZealand and on the way back from NewZealand. Tin-Lok, who was one of the members that came on the Australian team during the winter of 2005, drove us around and took us to many places in the city. The picture above was taken by Tin-Lok. We saw the Opera House at day time and at night.
Under the Sydney Harbour Bridge, we saw the city lights. The people in the picture above is Naomi, me and Tin-Lok's brother, Tin-Jon(I think that's right). This picture was also taken by Tin-Lok. We actually walked over the Bridge to go to the Opera House.
This is the Opera House and the Sydney Harbour Bridge taken from a distance. We actually went inside the Opera House, but didn't go very far.
This is me standing by a strange big plant which I've never seen before in the Northern Hemisphere at Torango Zoo.
After leaving Japan on the night of the 28th, we arrived in Sydney on the morning of the 29th. In the after noon, the same day we arrived in Sydney, Tin-Lok and Julie took us to the zoo. It was pretty cool. Since we were just going to be in the city, I didn't think that we would see Animals native to Australia, but we did! Obviously not in the picture above of Naomi, me, Tin-Lok and Julie with two gorilla statues, though.
We saw Kangaroos, Koalas, an Echidna,Wallabies and Wombats that are native to Australia. The sad thing was that we didn't see any Kangaroos hop. They were extremely lazy at the zoo. They were just lying on the ground not moving at all, probably because of the heat from the sun. I like the picture above of the Kangaroo. He looks like he's thinking because of the way he's folding his arms.
One of the things I think of when I hear of Australia is the Hillsong United band. They've come to Japan a couple times to do concerts. I've been to two of their concerts. I posted about one of the concerts on this blog earlier. They're a really great worship band. While in Australia we were able to visit the main Hillsong church and also the Hillsong church in the city. The picture above is of the church in the city. We were able to have a simple tour of the church. Both churches were very big. It was great to see where Hillsong United comes from after listening to there CDs a lot. At the church we bought three Albums, "In a valley by the Sea" , "To the ends of the earth" and "Everyday" They are great CDs.
This is a picture at a Chinese restaurant that Tin-Lok's mother took us to. You can see us, the Ghents, Tin-Loks brother and sister and Ms. Hayman(I think) who joined us for the meal after driving us back from Hillsong church.It was a delicious meal. We saw one of the restaurant staff cut up a cooked duck with it's beak still on.
We went to a prayer group that prays for Missionaries in Japan. My Dad spoke for a short time. It was nice meeting these people and talking.
These are the members of the Australian team that came to our church in Itayanagi during the Christmas season of 2005. We were able to see 6 of the people in the picture above again so that was nice catching up.
At one of the airports we actually had to walk outside and walk up one of those movable stairs to get into the airplane. For some reason I thought they stopped doing that, but I guess they still have to do that for small airplanes.
Australia was a nice place.
# posted by Aaron @ 5:45 PM 
