Sydney - Day One

Arrived this morning at about 8:00 am. Beautiful sunny day with high, blue skies. Cool though, about 12C with a nippy breeze. Tried to replace my SIM card in the iPhone so that I could have a working mobile with local phone rates but I realized that the Australian SIM that I had bought in Toronto was not a micro SIM that fitted an iPhone so $20 fssst. The attraction of the card that I bought at home was the supposedly reduced rates for calling back to Canada as well as calling locally in Australia. If you used the Telus roaming rate as the comparator they certainly looked good; 65 cents a minute to call home compared to $1.40 on Telus so I was a little upset that I would be incommunicado except for hotel wifi. Especially since I had not arranged for data/email roaming since the heart-stoppingly huge bill from Telus recently when I had emailed a couple of IPhone camera pictures from London. However, there were a couple of kiosks in the airport run by Verizon and Optus selling cards and I’m happy that the TO card was a bust. My new Optus SIM card is 4 cents a minute to Canada and 10 cents a minute inside Oz and includes, for the grand sum of $5, 325 megs of email/data! So, to my pleasant surprise, I have a good working phone and ongoing access to email. Lessons: always have an unlocked phone and always wait to get SIMs locally. Not exactly counter-intuitive when you think about it.

Went for a very long walk to The Rocks and around Circular Key and soaked in the sights but I’m feeling very fuzzy and not well-focussed so todays photos in keeping with my state of mind, are a dead loss. Off to bed.