Life: Under Construction: A new year -Holidays

Hey guys! Its been FOREVER since i've posted and i apologise. But as promised, this is a post about my holidays (Jan 2013)

The turn of the new year was amazing for me, as we were in Sydney watching the fireworks! :D

Let me rewind a little.

On the 29th of December, we left on our a little over a week trip around part of Australia! :)

We drove, well my parents took turns in driving the 4550 kilometers in total (I was in-charge of keeping track of this) and it was amazing!!

At first I was skeptical of having any actual fun, due to the long drives, but they too werent boring as such, filled with music, jokes and looking around etc.

We drove from Adelaide to Melbourne, stayed there 2 nights and I got a chance to look around old schools and houses and see just how big the place was (we didnt have a car when we used to live in melbourne so we saw a different part of melbourne city with access to a car, and the tollways were hell confusing!)

Then we drove off to Sydney, stopping at multiple small town in between, all of which had something to offer! In Sydney itself, we had an amazing view of the harbour bridge and sydney opera house from our hotel and after watching the 9pm fireworks, we actually came inside to see the later new year fireworks... they were brilliant!! The next day we saw sooo much, it was great to finally she the most well known attractions of Australia and Sydney seemed like a nice place :)

Sydney Harbour Bridge!

Sydney Opera House!

We then head off to Canberra, which wasnt too far from Sydney, and here I saw a well laid out state that seemed too empty to be honest. It was like our parliament house is in the middle of nowhere! It is quite the opposite in india and I think that is how it should be. I understand the story behind why it's there, but if it were in a more populated state, more would be able to enjoy it more, and more often.

We also saw the War memorial, although we didn't have the time to do so properly and had to be quick :(

Outside Commonwealth Place

You can see the Indian Flag right there! They had all the flags of the countries in teh Commonwealth.

National Library (i want to go in but we had no time :(

If only we had the space of time to stay the whole next day and then leave the day after. Despite this, we got a taste of it all, and it was a beautiful place nonetheless. Maybe a little too neat though :p

I also got to visit ANU (Australian National University) which is Australia's number 1 ranked uni and although its in the middle of nowhere, it would be amazing if I got in. But it require some incredibly high ATARs :/ Oh well.

ANU

We then drove back to Melbourne, and this time we stayed at Ballarat where we mainly spent the day at Soverign Hill. We had tonens of fun Gold Panning, getting tours of old mines and we saw Gold being extracted!

$18500 worth gold - extracted in front of us

That wasnt the only holiday place we went, we also went to Port Norlunga for a day, and Victor Harbour for 2 days. They were closer destinations but had heaps of fun at the beaches and seeing penguins and the like!