The Wandering Tattler

Today we awoke to bright sun. After breakfast we walked over to the opera house for a guided tour which took us into all the performing spaces, including the magnificent concert hall, as well as some back rooms, including one designed by Jorn Utzon, the Danish architect who designed the building in the sixties, resigned during a construction dispute in the seventies, and who has recently been re-hired to oversee a new stage of renovation. After this tour we took a bus to the Australian National Museum, a natural history and anthropological museum, and later we went to an opal shop near the Queen Victoria Building, where Lynn acquired a necklace. After ice cream in the Queen Victoria marketplace, we took a bus back to our hotel and rested before dinner at Circular Quay. After dinner we walked to the opera house where Lynn wanted to attend a performance of the Tony-award-winning play, “Doubt.” I waited a bit after she entered the building and was lucky enough to witness the evening flyout of hundreds of flying foxes, giant fruit-eating bats that roost in the Royal Botanical Garden. The bats, with 3-4 foot wingspans, flew out directly above me and over Sydney Harbor, their wing beats slow and stiff, calling to each other. This was a magical moment, but one which only I seemed to notice. Sydneyites are probably used to this scene and consider it unremarkable, while most tourists never look up at the right time of day.

Today our bus was diverted around a block near Government House, where streets were blocked by squads of police, some of horseback, and both this morning and later at the dinner hour, the harbor reverberated with the sounds of helicopters circling low overhead. All this commotion was due to the presence of Condoleeza Rice, who was conducting official business in Sydney.