The Blue Mountains are not blue, but still beautiful!

Hey hey!
Today was a busy day and it was different because we actually traveled outside of downtown Sydney and took a tour to the Blue Mountains. This included sight seeing of waterfalls, rainforest and "The Three Sisters", one of Australia's most recognizable and famous rock formations. We got up at around 7:00, got some Mickey D's from across the street and got picked up by a coach bus that took us to the bus station where we switched to the actual tour bus. We headed out with about 30 other people on our bus, with an Aussie tour guide and all. On our way to a wildlife reserve, our guide told us facts about Australia like the fact that 85% of the 22 million people live within 50 km of the coastline and that it costs 800 dollars a month to drive to work in Sydney. Random but interesting stuff like that.
After about 35 minutes on the bus, we arrived at the wildlife reserve, where we were greeted by a person holding a baby wallaby. I'm not sure what that is exactly but it was cute and soft and loved to be scratched under its chin! We then proceeded to see all kinds of birds flying around and free jumping kangaroos! They were raised in captivity so they are friendly to people and you can pet them, which we did! There is actually a whole section where you can feed the kangaroos, along with emus, and take pictures and pet them galore. That was a really cool experience. We also got to pet and take a picture with a koala! They are so soft and quite cute. It was really neat. We proceeded to see a tasmanian devil, a wombat, dingos, tons of species of birds and tons and tons of species of kangaroos. It was a really awesome place that you really got to see all the native species of Australia.
We then continued up to the actual Blue Mountains and found because it was overcast, it was extremely foggy and we couldn't see The Three Sisters at first..,it was just a wall of fog. But then, miraculously the fog lifted for about 2 minutes, revealing the Three Sisters. Our prayers were answered! My mom was ready to ask for part of our money back since these rocks are the most famous part of the tour! We got lucky that we saw it for the small amount of time the fog lifted. The next part of our tour consisted of going on a cable car skyline thing that had a clear floor where you could see a waterfall, the Three Sisters and the rainforest below. It was really beautiful and the rainforest and rock goes on forever it seems. Okay, we then went down the steepest railway in the world. This scared me...a lot. I hate roller coasters and I swear this railroad went almost 90 degrees. We were going straight down. It went slow so thank goodness it was not like a roller coaster so it was fun! The track used to take coal up from the valley when there used to be an active coal mine down there. After we got off the railway, we hiked around the rainforest for a little bit, running into a Canadian who had plenty of good things to share about the South Island of New Zealand and Christchurch. He was a talker! Wow, he was spitting out information at us left and right, but hearing all the great things he had to say about NZ and the friendly people has only made me more excited! After taking a cable car back up to the top where there was food and a gift shop, we had a really good buffet. It was delicious. I realized that lemonade in the states is not the same lemonade here. Their lemonade is basically like our sprite, which I thought was interesting. So when I ordered lemonade...I got sprite! Learned a little bit of terminology there. We then headed back onto the tour bus and stopped by the Sydney 2000 Olympic village, seeing where the athletes stayed and some of the big arenas. A trip on a ferry into the harbour was next, and it was neat to see all the really expensive hours lined up along the harbour and entering under the bridge and seeing the skyline. It was really really windy and a little chilly, but the sun was out by this point so it was a pretty scene!
We took a "free" shuttle back to our hotel which we had just found out about and are kind of upset that no one told us about this sooner because we've been paying this whole time! It goes till 6 p.m. so maybe we'll take it tomorrow. Anyways, we went back got changed into some nicer clothes and headed back to "The Rocks" to get some dinner. It seems to be our new hot spot. It's just so nice and has some great eating places there. We went to an Italian restaurant ( I can't remember the name) and got pizza, salad and spaghetti. It was in a really small place, was really hot, but it had character and was quite popular it seemed. After we got dinner we went directly next door to check out this Belgian chocolate cafe. We ended up sitting down and ordering a dark chocolate raspberry cheesecake, coffee and a dark chocolate milkshake. Their milkshakes here are not what they are at home...it literally was chocolate milk. Whoops! I was not expecting that but oh well. The cheesecake was AMAZING. Very very good. We once again took pictures out by the harbour (it seems to have become a must do now) and headed home...or tried to. We were waiting for 40 minutes for a bus to take us back, got frustrated so we started walking to find another bus stop to look for the bust we wanted. Because it's a Saturday night, Sydney was hoppin'. Everyone is going to fancy places or going clubbing. I felt underdressed walking through the streets. All the girls here were wearing super super short dresses or skirts and really high heels, while the boys were in dark jeans and button up shirts. There were long lines outside numerous clubs/ restaurants. It was getting crazy already and this was at like 10:30. It was cool to see Sydney's night life though.
Alright, I'm heading to bed...G'night! Hope all is well back in the States!