Our hotel was located in an area known as The Rocks. It is the oldest part of Sydney and is situated in Sydney’s city centre. The Rocks area is nestled at the foot of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and offers fabulous views of Circular Quay. There are a number of alleyways with cafes, pubs & restaurants and shops which give it an old world feel. After checking in to our hotel, the first thing we did was walk the 1km to the Sydney Opera House to get a tour. It is more breathtaking and spectacular than we had imagined. Some quick facts about the opera house:
• It has over 1 million ceramic tiles on the roof which were imported from Sweden.
• It was designed by Danish architect Jorn Utzon.
• It has 5 theatres; the Concert Hall and Opera Theatre are the largest venues and are contained in the largest shells. The small separate shell is actually a restaurant.
• The final cost of building the Opera House was $102 million, only a mere $95 million over budget!
The Concert Hall was the most impressive of all the theatres because of the high vaulted ceiling, the beautifully carved white timber and its grand organ. We were fortunate to experience the acoustics in the concert hall because during our tour we stumbled onto a rather large group of Australian children practicing for their annual concert. There were probably over 300 kids playing Simon & Garfunkel’s Scarborough Fair on recorder. After the tour, we figured we should try to see a performance and we were able to get tickets to opening night of the opera Lakmé! Lakmé was composed by Delibes (a French composer) and is mostly known for the Flower Duet and Bell Song. Too bad we were both extremely jet lagged, by the end of the second act even Liz (who loves the opera) was starting to doze.
Some other highlights from our stay in Sydney:
We took the ½ hour ferry ride from Sydney to Manly. Manly is a suburb on the other side of the harbor. It was pleasant ride; we had perfect views of the Opera House and Harbour Bridge. In Manly we went to Oceanworld; they have scheduled shark feedings every day and we actually arrived just in time to see a feeding. It was interesting to find out that the handlers have to keep to the same feeding ritual to keep order in the tank. They feed the stingrays first, then the turtles, then some smaller fish and finally the sharks. The day before our visit to Oceanworld, a Grey Nurse shark gave birth to a male pup. He was in a separate tank and was really cute, he looked like the adult sharks but very very small. We also rode the bus to Quarantine Station and drove past a gorgeous gothic-style chapel on a hilltop overlooking the ocean, which is where Nicole Kidman was married on June 25th.
Australians are known for being great sport fans, so we really wanted to go to a sporting event. We attended a footy match (AFL or australian rules football). The match we saw was the Sydney Swans versus the Fremantle Dockers. Neither one of us knew the rules of Footy, but it was clear that the ball is not thrown in footy, it can be propelled by foot or by a clenched fist. Players are awarded a free kick for making a clean catch of a ball that’s been kicked a certain distance. There are 4 vertical posts at each end of the field; the 2 middle posts are the goal posts and the 2 shorter posts on either side of the goal posts are the behind posts. The fans were really into the game (the Swans fans outfitted in red and white and Fremantle fans in purple and green) and there was a lot of trash talk back and forth and A LOT of beer drinking.
One thing we did not do was climb the Sydney Harbour Bridge. David thought that the price for walking up the bridge was exorbitant (Why pay to walk on the arch, when you can walk across the bridge for free?), so instead we walked up one of the bridge’s pylons. The bridge has two pairs of granite pylons at each end; they don’t structurally support the bridge and were in fact added to the bridge’s design simply for their aesthetic value. The southeastern pylon houses a museum and tourist centre which has a number of stories and artifacts from the bridge’s construction process. At the top of the pylon you can go outside to a lookout, with great views of the harbor.
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