Day 8 in Sydney -- before boarding

We woke up early (as we have been our whole time in Sydney, just have not gotten our time corrected). I had been watching the Marine Traffic website and "virtually" watched our ship come in and dock at the harbor. We decided to walk down and see our ship at the Overseas Terminal.

Along the way -- a picture of one of the local convenience stores -- we appreciated being able to get iced tea and snacks in these stores -- and there seemed to be one every couple of blocks throughout the Central Business District.

Celebrity Solstice at the Overseas Passenger Terminal -- note the Sydney Opera House looking almost ghostly in the background!

From the other side of Circular Quay

We met some of our fellow passengers also taking pictures, and they offered to take ours -- unfortunately a bit dark of us...

Another shot of the Celebrity Solstice

It was being re-fueled -- Carl mentioned that he was glad that he didn't have to pay that fuel bill, but then we realized that we are probably paying at least part of it (with our cruise fare).

On our way back to the hotel, we got a few pictures of the folks helping on a construction project for a building being built along Pitt Street (the street we walked to and from Circular Quay)...

... all of the traffic management people seemed to be women...

... maybe not obvious from this picture, but they were all quite pretty women...

... we figured that the hiring manager might have "interesting" criteria for the job needs!

Back in our room, we had wanted to see if we could observe water going down the drain spinning in an opposite direction to what we would see in the northern hemisphere. We had tried using the drain in the sink, but it just appeared to go straight down, no spin involved. So Carl decided to try cutting the bottom out of a water bottle and using it upside down. We still saw no spin with the cap removed, but we found that if we controlled the output to just a small opening, we could see the water spin...

If you'd like to see our experiment, we put together a video: https://youtu.be/kCZmwXiy024 -- You may need to make it fullscreen or larger to see it well.

So... our results were inconclusive -- and this article may explain why: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-somebody-finally-sett/ 

We finished experimenting and completed our packing, so decided to go ahead and head for the Overseas Passenger Terminal -- our boarding time was not until afternoon, but we had to check out of the hotel by 11am anyway, so we might as well wait there.

When we got to the terminal, we found that we could go ahead and drop our "checked" luggage, and proceed on to boarding...

There were a number of different sequential stops (lines we had to get into) where we had to have different things checked -- ship boarding pass, then passports, then immigration (passport control), then scanning of our hand-luggage and going through security for ourselves, but we were able to board early and were ultimately onboard before noon.

We enjoyed our week in Sydney, and got to see a lot of the most popular attractions! If you're going to fly for 14 hours, you'd better enjoy it once you get there!