My second day in Sydney was Christmas! It was cool and rainy. I spent the morning skyping with the family, opening a few present (I totally got Taylor Swift Keds. I’m totally not even embarrassed. They’re totally cute) and taking my time. It was a holiday after all!

Eventually, I got my butt in gear and decided to visit a few tourist traps. I wanted to remain busy to avoid being homesick. And nothing says, ‘Cheer up, Erin!’ like spending the holidays with adorable penguins and Kate and William. Plus, there really wasn’t much else open.

First up, I needed to get into the Christmas spirit and nothing says Christmas like a Hot Peppermint Mocha from Starbucks on a rainy morning. To make it vegan, I order a peppermint soy latte and add cocoa powder from the milk and sugar area. Possibly better then the original. Also, It was my first of the season. I was pumped! So pumped in fact that I went on to have one Starbucks beverage almost every day during my Sydney trip. Hello liquid calories!!

Then it was off to the Sydney Aquarium. Honestly, I was a little underwhelmed. There didn’t seem to be much room for many of the animals and there wasn’t really much chance to wander and explore. The aquarium was sort of set up as a one way path. You follow it and that’s that. It was surprisingly crowded on Christmas Day with tourist and I definitely felt the lack of space. I actually saw one family with an elderly person in a wheel chair bail out through an Employee Only exit because they couldn’t find any way out and didn’t have time to go through the whole aquarium. On the plus side though, they had Fairy Penguins, the smallest penguins in the world and oh-so-cute, as well as Dugongs, which are related to Manatees and I had never heard of before.

A nursery for shark eggs. How crazy are those spiraled ones??

Fairy penguins! super cute but they were all enclosed so I had a hard time getting a picture

Tiny little sea horse

Moon jellyfish, I believe.

The dugong.

I don’t believe them and I’m still not going in the water!

I took this picture in a tunnel you have to walk through. It’s surrounded on all sides by a tank and the sharks can just swim above your head, no big deal.

Next up was Madame Taussaud’s Wax Museum. Also VERY crowded. Particularly with tourists that were incredibly unaware of their surroundings and kept walking into my pictures. Or jumping the line for pictures. I was not amused. By the time I got out, I was so worked up and stressed all I could think of was, “Someone get me a margarita before I hurt someone!!”

I did see some amazing sculptures, though. Being in Sydney, there were a lot of Australian celebrities represented – Hugh Jackman, Miranda Kerr, Olivia Newton John- as well as huge A-listers like Brad and Angelina, William and Kate, Katy Perry and Leonardo Di Caprio. It’s amazing how real some of them look! The only room that really held no interest for me was the Australian history room because I didn’t know any of the figures and it was too crowded to leisurely read the cards.

What did you do on Christmas? I hung out with royalty. I actually got my picture taken with them but it was by one of the museum’s photographers and they tried to charge me, like, $45 for them. No thanks!

“You’re the one that I want, (you are the one I want), oo, oo,oo honey!”

Wolverine!

My “thank-gosh-I-got-out-of-that-museum-without-killing-anyone” Margarita.

After dinner, I wondered around the Sydney Harbor which was decorated for Christmas (So many Santas!) then went back to the room to relax and dry off from the rain.

I should have one more post from my Sydney travels coming next week. Let me know what you think of this Travel Tuesday feature!