Today we flew to Sydney. But first, on a lighter note:
The best brand name ever for toilet paper. Bar none.
Sydney! Now visiting for longer than 10 hours! Much better this time. Sydney's a big city. It's very cosmopolitan, with a vibrant and busy downtown, a very functional subway and train system, and nice parks. Which of course, have nice flowers.
Much like New Zealand, WWI and ANZAC and Gallipolli loom large in the national consciousness. (The first A in ANZAC stands for Australia, after all.) This is the memorial park for WWI in Sydney.
With a view of the East side of downtown.
The Aussies haven't quite figured out how to incorporate biking into their cityscapes yet, but they're trying. Rather than put in bike lanes, or change car/parking lanes into bike lanes, they simply encourage bikers to use the sidewalks. With predictable outcome of bikers being the scapegoat for both pedestrians and drivers. Not the best. And their shared walkway/bikeway stencils have the creepy feel of a child being stalked or about to be run over by a steamroller.
One thing I do like about Sydney, and in fact that most people like about Sydney, is the harbor. This city uses its waterfront well. And it better, considering how dramatic and beautiful the water is. The Circular Quay, between the harbor bridge:
and the Opera House:
is constantly busy with ferries. Probably one every couple of minutes is either docking or putting out to...well, not exactly sea, but to water. Also, perhaps the largest cruise ship I've ever seen. We ate dinner on the water, and the large screen on the top deck was quite easily visible from where we were seated.
But we were here for the Opera. And the Opera House, perhaps even more.
A detail of one of the shells. Lots and lots of tiles.
And a cool brass plaque, describing what the actual shapes were modeled after.
Essentially various wedge shaped cut outs of a sphere, arranged and stacked upon each other. The text, written by the architect, implies that having a scheme like this not only unified his concept, but made the fabricating the parts of the building easier as well, as the curves were easily mapped and built upon, being part of a regular shape.
We attended a talk about the opera we were to see, "The Barber of Seville". The Assistant Director did her best to make a talk about the politics of Italian opera seem more interesting than it was, which was essentially a bunch of Italians and their families getting angry at each other, yelling, fighting, and various factions and families always at war somehow.
See! There goes the cruise ship, that's pretty cool!
I'm not being fair, though. I did learn about the opera, and how it was written, and its first performance...and.....
Oh darn, now it's gone.
It was pretty neat that even the smaller of the two stages at the Opera House had a mini-amphitheater for presentations like this, and that the back drop was a pretty traditional Aboriginal painting.
Closer.
CLOSER.
EVEN CLOSER.
There, that's good.
The stage, before the first Act. I won't bore you with my amateur review. If you're really curious, buy me a drink sometime.
The insides of the shells had an almost-Brutalist feel, with lots of unpolished, uncovered concrete. But the swooping forms, and good use of space made the entire place much more welcoming than, say, the Boston City Hall buildling.
So that was a day. An cross country flight, checking into a hotel, a walk through a major world city, and an opera. Probably time for some sleep, and explore tomorrow.
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