And great views:

The fireworks were good, even if we were downwind and sometimes saw too much smoke:

So this time, I opted for a few different museums:

Then, I did of course walk around Sydney a bit, and here are a few pictures:

Sydney grammar school, that's a fancy building to learn grammar :)

the rocks

Circular Quay:

circular quay can host huge cruise ships

Luna Park across the river

win for australia!

Darling Harbour:

After the museusm were closed, I went to the royal botanic gardens to enjoy the views and the birds:

found a customer

made a 'friend'

it was quite interested with my ear and nibbled it gently :)

and some new customers I hadn't seen before

linux.conf.au was at UTS, clearly an interesting building:

More night pictures:

Finishing the week (albeit not quite the trip) with Australia Day celebrations by Sydney Opera House, didn't suck too much :) [Australia_Day/221*]

On my last day, I went back to try learning Surfing south of Sydney and while I didn't do great, I at least learned some during the day.

On the last night, I went to Black Bar and Grill in a fancy hotel/casino to try some Wagyu. Sadly, the smaller and more expensive one of the two was actually the lesser one as far as melt in your mouth, went. Thankfully the 2nd one was not Japan good, but still pretty good:

It was then time to take the airport train back to Sydney Airport and fly home after trying 3 different lounges in the airport :)

pretty but this got our bus very late

in turn, our bus had a hard time driving down with stuck trucks on the way blocking the road

finally made it to Lausanne, not the best lake view ever :)

I got lucky during my quick walk

made it to the cathedral

nice view from the clock tower

2.2H was really short of what I was hoping of, but I had enough time to walk to the cathedral and climb to the top, then take an uber to the Olympic Museum], which was definitely worth closer to 2H, but I did the best with 1h or so I had.

did I say great lake views?

it was then time to get back to the train station and catch my direct TGV back to Paris, for my plane to SFO and foloowing plane to Sydney :)

France did break and still holds the world speed record for wheeled trains

Switzerland was pretty expensive, restaurants were kind of reaching the outlandish pricing range, so we took a deal to have the dinner of the day at a mere $25/day. It wasn't great every night, but it was simple enough and onsite, so that worked :)

We first stop was at Paccard museum, next to one of the 2 factories in the world that makes giant bells. Cool place:

keyboard to play static bells

You can listen to the video from the bells:

We then drove around the lake to the north part where Annecy lies:

Annecy old town is very nice, almost a small venice:

lots of water due to recent rains :)

We then went to the local castle which wasn't much, but had reasonably interesting displays in some rooms:

old town

Eventually it was time to walk back to the car and go home after stopping by a nice local cathedral:

While Annecey is not a must do in France, it was a nice day tour for a day we otherwise couldn't ski. Thanks to Arturo for the driving there and back.

The rest of Bourg St Maurice is not much to see, just a good base to go to ParadiSki (les arcs), and have Tignes/Val d'Isère be about 1h away by bus. Sadly, the weather was crap as in warm crap. It rained on the bottom slopes (up to 2000 meters) while the top slopes were shut down for wind most of the time. I ended up only skiing 2.5 days out of 6, pathetic :(

At least we got to enjoy some dinners and a side trip to Annecy on another day where all ski resorts were shut down due to the winds...

The TGV trip was nice, too bad that train couldn't take me all the way to the destination

then down to a regional train

and the snow version of it after bridging disabled tracks by road

We enjoyed food :)