Thursday, March 16, 2006
Sydney: March 11
[Needless-to-say, the pictures I posted for March 10 were intended for this posting.]
Today was bright and sunny, with temperatures in the upper 70s. Our hotel is on Harrington Street in “the Rocks,” Sydney’s compact historic district, now converted to trendy clubs, pubs, shops, and hotels. We’re only a couple of blocks from the “Circular Quay,” the main embarkation point for commuter ferries and buses, site of anchorage for many cruise ships, and the focus for much tourist activity and street music. We bought a five-day Sydney Pass, which provides reduced fares on all public transit systems (buses, trains, ferries) and public facilities, such as the Royal Botanical Museum and Sydney Tower, and took a useful 2-hour tour of the city on the Sydney Explorer Bus, which provides recorded commentary on 27 sites of interest in the city.
We got off the bus to enjoy spectacular views of the opera house and harbor bridge from the opposite side of the adjacent cove. We also explored Chinatown and a vast indoor public marketplace. After lunch we enjoyed the exhibits at Sydney’s great aquarium, which features Australian fish and includes a “walk-through” tank with many large sharks and a manta ray. We also saw two living platypuses and an Australian lungfish, one of the lobefinned fishes that is distantly related to the ancestor of all tetrapods. The aquarium is on Darling Cove, another waterfront venue that has been successfully re-developed and is a commercially and architecturally vibrant area.
We dined outdoors at a The Italian Village at a table with a view of the opera house. During the course of our dinner several wedding parties visited the plaza in front of the restaurant for photographs in front of the opera house. After dinner we took a 90-minute harbor cruise on one of the state ferries, which took us on a sedate and graceful loop through many of the coves and bays in neighboring parts of Sydney Harbor, which is has an exceedingly complex form. After the cruise we enjoyed strolling among the UNICEF bears, a set of approximately one hundred identical 6-foot-tall bear statues, each of which was uniquely painted by an artist to represent his own nation. This traveling exhibit holds great crowd appeal and will be next be shown in Berlin. After wandering back toward our hotel, we found that The Rocks was/were indeed rocking. The bars and clubs were full of revelers, and the noise level was fairly high, though not too bad around our hotel.
Today was bright and sunny, with temperatures in the upper 70s. Our hotel is on Harrington Street in “the Rocks,” Sydney’s compact historic district, now converted to trendy clubs, pubs, shops, and hotels. We’re only a couple of blocks from the “Circular Quay,” the main embarkation point for commuter ferries and buses, site of anchorage for many cruise ships, and the focus for much tourist activity and street music. We bought a five-day Sydney Pass, which provides reduced fares on all public transit systems (buses, trains, ferries) and public facilities, such as the Royal Botanical Museum and Sydney Tower, and took a useful 2-hour tour of the city on the Sydney Explorer Bus, which provides recorded commentary on 27 sites of interest in the city.
We got off the bus to enjoy spectacular views of the opera house and harbor bridge from the opposite side of the adjacent cove. We also explored Chinatown and a vast indoor public marketplace. After lunch we enjoyed the exhibits at Sydney’s great aquarium, which features Australian fish and includes a “walk-through” tank with many large sharks and a manta ray. We also saw two living platypuses and an Australian lungfish, one of the lobefinned fishes that is distantly related to the ancestor of all tetrapods. The aquarium is on Darling Cove, another waterfront venue that has been successfully re-developed and is a commercially and architecturally vibrant area.
We dined outdoors at a The Italian Village at a table with a view of the opera house. During the course of our dinner several wedding parties visited the plaza in front of the restaurant for photographs in front of the opera house. After dinner we took a 90-minute harbor cruise on one of the state ferries, which took us on a sedate and graceful loop through many of the coves and bays in neighboring parts of Sydney Harbor, which is has an exceedingly complex form. After the cruise we enjoyed strolling among the UNICEF bears, a set of approximately one hundred identical 6-foot-tall bear statues, each of which was uniquely painted by an artist to represent his own nation. This traveling exhibit holds great crowd appeal and will be next be shown in Berlin. After wandering back toward our hotel, we found that The Rocks was/were indeed rocking. The bars and clubs were full of revelers, and the noise level was fairly high, though not too bad around our hotel.
# posted by Ken @ 2:43 AM 
