Our first port of call in Australia was Sydney . We docked on a bright sunny morning right across from the opera house. Since we will be coming back to Sydney March 4, This was more of an exploratory mission to find out about public transportation and decide what sites we wanted to see . We found out that there are hop-on, hop-off buses and ferries that will take us anywhere we want to go.

After that we were off to the opera house to see if we could get tickets for when we return here in March. Success -- we got orchestra tickets to Il Trovatore . Then we took the hop-on bus for its entire route around the city.

We walked around The Rocks, a restored area of shops, restaurants and a museum of contemporary art. And naturally I stopped at what was billed as the oldest pub in Sydney where I had a couple of black ales and an Aussie meat pie. Pub food is usually good and also much cheaper than the restaurants.

The museum of contemporary art was really well done. They have a lot of works by aborigines, very different from anything we see stateside. Laura had me take lots of photos of the artwork.

One strange thing. We were leaving the pub -- The Fortunes of War -- headed back to the ship when a couple in the next pub down the street start waving to us. We figured they were people we met on the ship. It turned out that they we total strangers who thought they recognized us.

Another strange thing. Coming back to the ship we saw an egret-like bird perched on a trash can picking through the trash. I've never seen that type of bird outside a marsh, certainly not on a city street.

There's so much to see and do here in Sydney that we have to pick and choose. Aside from the opera, we'll go to the Sydney museum, the botanical gardens, maritime museum, the zoo and Bondi beach. We plan to hit them all when we get back in March.