Sydney Opera House

Let's go back in time, shall we? We need to visit an important chapter in our Australia visit that I haven't had time to really discuss, but that needs to be told. Our first week in Australia, you might remember, we stayed in Sydney with our friends Kelvin and Yan-Shih. They were gracious hosts and we had a great time. The day before we headed down to Melbourne (Dec. 20) Kane, Yan-Shih and I took a trip to the Sydney Opera House.

This structure has awed me for many years. It is beautiful, creative, and interesting visually, architecturally, and structurally. It sits on the very tip of the city lands, reaching out into the harbor, surrounded by water on three sides. Approaching it looked just like the many pictures I have seen in the past: beautiful white sails projecting gracefully into the air, looming effortlessly over each other like a family gathered together near the bay. Once we got very close, I was striken by how dated the structure looked - it was finished in 1973. The tile work, woodwork on the interior and just the whole feel of the structure was very 1970's-ish, which was suprising. It is a very elegant place, well-kept and still very beautiful, but it does have a decidedly older feel, which I hadn't expected by the timeless exterior (at least from far away).

We took a tour of the place which claimed to be as exciting as the plays and shows that the Opera House holds, but wasn't. The tour was a typical boring tour with a guide that told you interesting factoids in an uninteresting manner. We walked around, children squirming, and sat in the different theater areas (there are 4 seperate theaters there). Some interesting facts (approximate "facts", as I remember them) were: the place took 16 years to build when it was supposed to take like 3 or something; the budget was supposed to be like $7 million, but ended up being over $100 million; the architect (Jorn Utzon) walked off the project before it was finished resulting in the interior spaces of the theaters not being built as he designed them. The architect has also never been to the completed opera house and has never returned to Australia at all since the falling out in 1966. His 90th birthday is this year and there are murmurs of trying to get old Jorn back in town to reunite with his masterpiece.

The only thing I was unhappy about was the cloudy day, which made for substandard pictures of the place. The exterior of the opera house is cloud-colored, so it sort of blended in with the sky - grrr! Anyway, I'm hoping we will return when some fortunate family member comes to visit and stops in Sydney. That day it will be sunny. Until then, my pics will have to do. I'll try to get some uploaded on Snapfish to share.

Mooching

So, we've been mooching off of Kane's friends for the past 4 days now. We're staying at their house (in their room, no less), eating their food, and pretty much bothering them all their waking hours (at least when they're home). They are extremely gracious to have us here, and it's been really great. Fortunately for them, there is a light at the end of the tunnel as we have booked our next move.

Kane and I are both eager to get jobs and a place to live; vagrancy hasn't been as welcome in our lives as we might have imagined. We both seem to long for something to work for, which would in fact be just that - work. So, we're moseying on down to Melbourne where we anticipate that we will settle. We have booked a temporary apartment for the next two weeks, which we hope to use as a home base to find permanent housing and jobs. People are going on "holiday" for the holidays and are renting their places out to travelers like us. We were really lucky to find the place we did at the time we did and I hope it all works out ok. We fly down on Friday and move in Saturday.

We explored Sydney downtown a bit yesterday, it rained today. We went to Darling Harbor and walked around. It's relatively comparable to Pier 39 in San Francisco except less tacky, and I would actually readily compare Sydney in general to San Francisco. Except there are not the hordes of homeless people waiting to accost you. Plus, I don't know if they have the crappy areas that SF does; we were more in the area like the financial district - downtown Market Street. It was fun. The weather is supposed to be nice tomorrow and we plan to hit up the other half of downtown with the opera house, etc.

One comment that Kane would like me to mention is the lunch we had while we were downtown, specifically, the lunch he had. We were wary of having lunch downtown; all restaurants appear to be very expensive here. So, it would be fitting that the tourist area on the harbor would be the most expensive. There were a plethora of nice restaurants, packed with savvy white collar folks who work downtown. Typical lunches were over $20 a person. We weren't into that, so we went a block away from the harbor are and found a nice cafe with cheaper sandwiches. I got a veggie burger and Kane got a chicken sandwich costing $9.50 combined. My veggie burger was very mediocre, but Kane's chicken sandwich was quite interesting. To his surprise, in addition to chicken, tomato, and lettuce, this sandwich also included beets, a fried egg, ham, and a slice of pineapple. It looked nasty to me but he seemed to like it, even commenting how he could go for another one today. Weird Australians...

Welcome to Sydney

It is our second day in Sydney, Australia and today we are far more conscious and far less zombie-like. Getting here wasn't really so bad, but we were awake for quite a while. We awoke at 8am on Friday morning to catch our 11:40am flight to Bangkok. Then we had to sit around the airport and consume overpriced things until our flight to Sydney at 5pm, which was delayed 1 hour till 6. The flight was only 8.5 hours which was not too bad but neither of us could sleep. The time difference added 4 hours, so we arrived at 7am. We're staying with Kane's friends (god bless them) and we went around with them yesterday to the mall, grocery store, and hung out around the house. We took a 2 hour nap at 2pm because we couldn't stay awake any longer. The nap was surprisingly helpful and we were able to stay up till midnight.

Today we feel refreshed, though the rain spoiled our plans to go to the beach and downtown Sydney. They don't call downtown "downtown" though, they call it the CBD, I think, for Central Business District or something. Apparently if you call it "downtown" they will laugh at you. Noted. So we went around the mall, which is surprisingly similar to an American mall near Christmas time (extremely crowded, Christmas music playing, Santa in the center of the mall, etc.) except that it has grocery stores in it, which is actually rather nice since we are staying right across the street.

This is a far more ethnically diverse city than I had thought it would be - it is almost exactly like the bay area. It basically feels like home here except for our notable lack of an actual home. Everyone speaks English (sort of), we can read the signs, traffic follows rules (although they drive on the wrong side), nice restaurants and McDonalds' abound, the works. We have noted that: 1. Restaurants are far more expensive - a typical Applebees style dinner for two would probably run you at least $30 or $40 here rather than the $20 in the US; 2) Selected items are ridiculously expensive - groceries are normal while clothing, some electronics, and books are outrageous; and 3) Cell phones don't have the regular monthly plans that provide a certain number of minutes for a certain price. Rather, you buy a cell phone and a sim card and charge up your card with money at the drug store. It's strange, but it may actually end up being cheaper, we'll see. Gotta get a cell phone first, and they are expensive. Also, one American dollar is worth only slightly more than an Australian dollar ($1 US = $1.16 AUS), so they are almost even - boo. This will be good for us when we start working though.

It's nice here (summertime, whoo-hoo!) and we're looking forward to exploring the city more and getting some pics.