Today is the end of the New Zealand cruise and the beginning of the Tokyo cruise. We were up at 6:00 am to do the little packing necessary and be ready to be out of the room by 8:00 am. Tradition said we have breakfast in the dining room where we ate with two couples who were getting off. Since we had to get off the ship anyway for immigration, we wandered off with everyone else. We strolled around the pier to the Sydney Opera House and got there just in time for a guided tour. It was very interesting - would love to attend a performance one day. They are doing a refurbishment of the whole place which will take 10 years and is budgeted at around $200 million AUD. The original cost of building it in 1961 was budgeted at $7 million but ended up costing $103 million which was paid for from proceeds of a special lottery that ran for about 7 years. There are approximately a million tiles from Sweden on the roof-nobody knows for sure since no one thought to count them during construction. Now they go around every 2 years to tap each tile checking for broken or damaged ones. Why don't they just count them then?
When we came back out I saw that I had missed a video call from Daniel so I hooked onto the free WiFi from the nearby botanical gardens and called back. Great fun to call with the iconic opera house behind me.
Getting back on the ship was quick and easy and we had lunch in the buffet with a couple from Indiana. There are about 2,100 Australians with a couple hundred each Americans and British on board. The last cruise had quite a few Chinese, although we didn't hear exact numbers. Spent the afternoon unpacking and reading/resting. Then it was off to dinner to meet up with our British cruise friends, Carol and Peter. We haven't seen them since our South American cruise in 2015, but it was just like we had been with them only last month - immediately back to laughing and joking.
The show was an Australian comedian, Scott Williams, who was OK. The televisions were working for a while this afternoon, but were out again after dinner. Hope they get this fixed soon.
Tomorrow is the first of 4 sea days before Darwin.
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