New Year in the Emerald City

Our travels are only just over halfway through, but it feels like we're on the home strait now that we've arrived in our penultimate country, and the comforts of Oceania, hitting Sydney bang on time to catch New Year.
The overnight flight from Singapore delivered two bleary-eyed backpackers to Oz on morning of 29 December and we made our way through the dawn to the Central Station area, where we were certain a reservation awaited us in the YHA. The clean-looking hostel has a pool, gym and great amenities, so imagine our joy to find this wasn't where we had a booking; our home was to be some similarly named bohemian affair in Sydney's red-light district, Kings Cross. We've now settled in to what appears to be a Teutonic gulag, a 5-storey warehouse of a hostel, full of German travellers and equipped with the most intrusive tannoy system to keep us all on our toes. All that's missing is the slogan "Arbeit Macht Frei" over the door. Due to our European neighbours, it's a fight to get to the bread and milk in the morning, but we've managed to explore the city somewhat in between exercising in the yard and lock down.
Without wasting time, we've had a good old trawl around the city to take in the ususal suspects of opera house, harbour bridge, the famous aquarium and the telecom tower, though for the latter we queued for 4 hours altogether to take in the view of the city and sit on a virtual country tour where Rach felt a little "nauseous".

The immediate highlight of the last few days has of course been New Year's Eve, for which we were secured front row seats courtesy of Rachel's family friends, Derek and Shan. As such we were able to ignore the frantic tannoy organisation of our hostel residents, joining the queue for the Botanic Gardens at 10am to assure a paltry view; instead, we sauntered to Derek and Shan's Woolloomooloo apartment for tea-time, had a swift drink with the rest of the group and then the 10 of us wandered to Government house to pick up our picnic hampers, darlings. Occupying our places with a raised view of the opera house 200m away and overlooking the boats and harbour bridge, we cracked open the bubbly and threw the odd piece of cake to the hoi-polloi.
All too soon it was midnight and we were able to bring in 2007 with the fireworks in front of that iconic view, the bridge's 75th anniversary and therefore a diamond jubilee for the Emerald City's "coathanger".
Happy New Year to all of you out there from both of us down here. To those we'll be seeing in Oz and NZ, we can' wait to meet up; for those keeping the home fires burning, see you soon enough!
We're off back to the hostel; it's lockdown in half an hour and I don't wanna get caught in the shower without my shank!