Note that this was a post from my blog at an older location: Posted July 10 2008

Well, as most of you should know, World Youth Day is being held in Sydney this week, and it “should attract more international visitors than the Olympics”, which I highly doubt, although there are a lot of people in Sydney. Catching public transport to the city gets rather noisy, and pretty much anytime we stop at a station, WYD visitors cheer at the fellow WYD visitors. I myself am not a Catholic but today, I went to see the events being held, but more on that later. I first plan to tell you how my holidays have been.

Well, I have been doing an awful lot of walking the past few days and I am kinda tired but I still feel like going out tomorrow or something… On Tuesday, I went to the city, to head over to the tax office there… Me being stupid and unaware of obvious things (like the address given on the website but instead I trusted my dad…) meant that we did a lot of walking up and down the city that day. Believing it was at Market Street, being told it had moved to Goulburn Street at World Square, then re-directed back up, past Market Street again to go to Lang Street, near The Rocks. With it being WYD, it was rather crowded and so made the walk a little more difficult. I’ve finally tried Takoyaki! (Takoyaki is a traditional(?) little side dish that’s basically flour, spices and octopus but it has a whole lot more as well I think. It’s basically a Fried Octopus Ball… Featured in quite a few animes…) Bought some yesterday from a Japanese Resturant, 8 for $6.50 which i don’t think is that bad… They are actually pretty good, they aren’t that salty, but they aren’t dull either. It’s a fairly nice balance and I wouldn’t mind buying some more…

That brings me to today. To start off, I spent about from 10am to 3pm bushwalking with Toby and Hursh. Quite tiring and a part of the walking track that we planned to walk didn’t seem to exist somewhere through it, so we had to take a detour. This led us to a place a fair way away from our original designated destination so we caught a bus to the nearest train station. Toby went home and so Hursh and I decided to go to the city, and see what kind of events were happening in the city. So once we got of the train, we planned to go to “Barrangaroo” via George Street. We reached the corner of George Street and Bridge Street at 4:30pm where there were a lot of people waiting to see the Popemobile.

The crowd down Bridge Street from George Street

So we decided to join the crowd and wait for Pope Benedick XVI to drive past in the Popemobile. Waiting, watching other people try to squeeze in, random person from inside the hotel behind us shouting “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!” and watching the pretty little helicopters fly above us filming the event. It wasn’t till about 5pm when the the Popemobile started moving. It was traveling down George Street at about 5:10pm when it drove past us. Maybe it was the South Koreans, (not being racist) or a some sort of message that he drove really quickly past us, so we barely got a glimpse of him, and that my camera was not responding to me trying to take a photo… So he drove down Bridge Street and he seemed to be going quite a bit slower now and my camera decided to start taking photos again so I tried to take an image of at least the popemobile… Here is the blurry little photo:

The popemobile down Bridge Street and a zoom in of who I believe was the Pope.

Hehe, yeah that was fun… After he drove past, there was a McDonalds behind us and there was a TV there, so we thought that we may as well take a look to see where he was at. The drive through the CBD must have been rather quick because by the time we got to see the TV (which was barely a few minutes), he was already driving past the Opera House and through the Botanical Gardens! Wonder if he was following the speed limit. Oh well, that was basically today, and that bush walking took quite a bit out of me so I’ll probably wake up with sore legs but anyway. Oyasuminasai!