Trip to Australia & New Zealand: Day 5: September 5, 2008: Blue Montains

Time to a trip to the Blue Montains!
Impressive scenery, I must say. In the morning we went to Scenic World, some kind of theme park on the Blue Montains, where you can find this, for instance:


But I will be honest with you: for me, the highlight of the day was the visit to this kind of zoo, the Featherdale Park, where we had our first contact with the australian exquisite wildlife:


After a long and fulfilled day, we were back to Sydney again. While looking for some place to dinner, we found this:

I couldn't believe that we had found a restaurant named after my home place! When I got home, I found this article on Wikipedia which states that this fastfood franchise was founded by an actual Oporto resident. But I found this hilarious statement: "Oporto specialises in Portuguese style chicken (properly known as Galinha à Africana)". I am Portuguese and I know for granted that "Galinha à Africana" (which translates to African Chicken) is NOT typically portuguese :) I guess that's not a complete surprise: I've been told several times that the many chinese restaurants we know do not serve actual typical chinese food...
Late night we went for a walk on the Rocks. Because of this, you will find one more photo of the Opera House in this set, this one taken by night :)

An Israeli's view of the conflict.

[Political] The truth about the Palestinian loss of land 1946 to 2000, by Roy Osherove, Israeli and objective.
I must say this is an opinion that I respect.

Try to open the cave's door (puzzle)

How to ride a KTM

SERIOUS FUN!

In Autoblog: Video: KTM demonstrates how to ride its bikes

Explicação para a Crise Financeira

Acabei de ler um artigo intitulado "Para onde foi o dinheiro?" que me foi enviado, publicado na imprensa alemã (jornal Die Zeit, 27/Nov/2008 - tradução auto pelo Google aqui) e traduzido por Elisabete Antunes (uma benfeitora desconhecida).
Para quem já está farto de ouvir falar em crise financeira, crise de crédito, crise SubPrime, etc., aconselho vivamente a leitura deste artigo!

Eis um excerto (da tradução):
"podemos encontrar a primeira resposta à pergunta sobre o paradeiro do dinheiro na cidade fantasma perto de Las Vegas: só no estado do Nevada estão 22.000 casas à venda. Em todo o país existem 4,67 milhões de casas e apartamentos desabitados. Ninguém os quer. Custaram uma média de 212.000 dólares o que perfaz um total de 990 mil milhões presos nas paredes e no chão."

Podem ler o resto aqui

Trip to Australia & New Zealand: Day 4: September 3, 2008: Sydney Sights with the Works

We got up, early in the morning, to catch the so called "Sydney Sights with the Works" tour.
Basically, we traveled inside and outside Sydney... a lot. To be honest, it was too exhausting, despite some spectacular scenery that we were able to see, as you can check by the photos.
Beside the scenery, the hightlights were the unexpected "magpie's bus invasion", the lunch on board at the cruise and the 8 AUD that we paid for 2 little coffees in a bar at Bondi Beach!
Anyway, Sydney is beautiful: