Aussie Craft Beer

Contrary to popular belief, Fosters is not, in fact, Australian for beer. Respectable Aussie beer drinkers barely touch the stuff, opting for VB or XXXX in a pinch, but usually preferring one of Australia's wide variety of microbrews. On a per capita basis, craft brewing is huge in Australia, and if my admittedly unscientific sampling was at all representative, these folks know what they're doing when it comes to water, barley, and hops.

The highlight of our Australian beer drinking was a taster flight at a funky old pub in the Rocks, Sydney, where the bartender was happy to line us up a row of his favorites.

For the beer drinkers out there, in case you ever come across one of these beauties, here they are from right to left:

• Dirty Granny, a tart hard cider.
• Full Steam Pale Lager, simple, mild, and malty.
• Sharer, the house brew, a nice hoppy Pilsener.
• Little Creatures Pale Ale, which is like an angel weeping for joy, lightly carbonated.
• Vales/EX Stout, an experimental stout brewed with a whole bunch of flavorings, coffee and molasses the most prominent among them.

Hey, Sydney's Pretty Photogenic . . . !

Can you believe we're still catching up on Australia & New Zealand posts? We even have one or two things from Okinawa in the queue. Good thing we're too busy with school to do any new interesting stuff.

I won't lie: Nana and I spent most of our time in Sydney poking around the city's many excellent museums. We both have soft spots for history and ravenously devoured anything we could find about the city's convict past. When we weren't in a museum, we were just ravenously devouring anything we could find.

But we did stop to take a few photos of this very beautiful city whenever the early winter weather would permit.

Huh, my opera looks oddly like air guitar . . .

That's better.

Now, you may not have realized this, but apparently that's a pretty famous building out there. There were, like, all these tourists taking photos of it and stuff.

An old street in the Rocks. Totally cool neighborhood, awesome little (free!) museum.

The Sydney Harbour Bridge.

This is from the top of Observatory Hill.

That's the observatory.

Looking down at the western part of the harbour.

The old clock tower at the central train station. This was conveniently right by our hotel!