We went to Sydney for the weekend, and certainly learned why this is such a famous city!
We visited my friend Anna who came to see us in Brisbane a few months ago.
Anna has two little girls, Helena and Sofia.
And her husband is a basketball player for the Sydney Kings. He's the tallest guy on his team at 6'11"!!
The Kings played an undefeated team from Woolongong that night and beat them! It was a fun game, but basketball in Australia isn't the spectacle that it is in the states.
We wore purple for the home team!
Before the game, Anna and the girls showed us around the stadium. They go to every game.
We went straight from the airport to the stadium, so this was our first glimpse of Sydney, and I was just so thrilled to be out of the Brissy heat!
Anna and the girls took us to their favorite Japanese restaurant - it was delicious!
They bring the food on a sizzling cast iron plate with the meat still raw, and we had to stir it to cook the meat!
On Saturday morning we babysat the girls and went via bus and ferry to Sydney city center. Sofia was afraid of the ferry so I held her when it came! Helena on the other hand was so excited she couldn't wait.
Most of the city sits on the giant Sydney Harbor, and we saw some gorgeous views on the ferry!
We got our first glimpse of the famous Opera House while on the ferry.
We got off at Circular Quay, which is the hub of ferries in the city and right next door to the Opera House.
The boardwalk along the harbor at Circular Quay is beautiful to walk along, and quite crowded with tourists. We both thought Sydney felt a lot like Seattle with the harbour and cloudy sky!
We saw a few Aboriginal street performers.
The Opera House is incredible because it's built above the water, so the boardwalk curves around it.
The views from the boardwalk are amazing with the city, the Harbor Bridge, the townhomes across the harbor and the Opera House.
Panoramic from near the Opera House.
I read that the roof of the Opera House is meant to look like the sails of the boats that are always in the harbor, but that they also look like turtles mating!
Climbing the Sydney Harbor Bridge is a popular tourist activity - but it's pretty expensive too! We saw many people climbing across the top of it throughout the day.
Sofia and Helena were very well behaved and did really well with all the walking we did! It was so fun to spend the morning with them!
A couple from Hawaii asked if we wanted them to take a family picture with the bridge behind us, and we said we're not all family but took them up on the offer!
It was very windy that day and Sofia had to hold her hat on her head! She was also freezing but insisted on tying her sweatshirt around her waist!
The Opera House is huge and has many other things besides an opera theater, one of which was a free Dr. Seuss exhibition.
There were original paintings and sculptures of Dr. Seuss' work, with historical and political context. It was quite fascinating!
These paintings from the Lorax were about as tall as I am and my favorite piece, since that's my favorite Dr. Seuss book.
Anna picked up the girls around noon and we walked around the city without them for the afternoon. We went to the Royal Botanic Gardens, which cover 30 hectares in the middle of downtown Sydney!
The garden used to be a farm that provided food for the Sydney area when it was a British colony in the 18th century. Now it has all types of native and non-native plants and a few large fields like this to relax in.
It has a rose garden which, to be honest, doesn't compare to the rose garden in Portland!
There were many large tropical trees and plants as well as a tarzan wannabe.
It has a whole fern section, which wasn't too exotic since we grew up with ferns everywhere, but this giant fern did wow us! The full grown leaves are taller than a person!
The cactus section was probably my favorite, as there were some very odd looking plants. This one is the size of a tree!
These cacti were all wrinkly on the edges.
Next to the Botanic Garden is the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which looks very small from the outside because most of the building is underground. So, we entered on the ground floor which is also the top floor!
There are many pieces by Australian artists - this is a landscape of New Zealand by an Australian artist. There is also a small section of Aboriginal art, which we weren't allowed to take pictures of, but was breathtaking. Aboriginal art looks something like this:
Images are created using dots of different colors, and are usually very bright. Like all art, it's even more impressive to see in person.
The sculpture section is usually my favorite part of any art museum, and this one had mostly European sculptures.
We had a great view of the city from the ground floor!
The gallery of NSW also has an impressive section of Asian art, which includes a lot of buddhist sculptures like this that are thousands of years old.
Another Buddhist sculpture, from Thailand.
The painted China was so detailed and colorful, I wanted to buy a set of it!
This is a wooden sculpture. The detail is just incredible.
This installation was quite powerful - the 30 statues are holding clothes of people that are victimes of violence perpetuated over the last century, such as the atomic bomb, genocide, war, etc. It's by a Japanese artist whose name I can't remember.
The traditional architecture of Sydney is very different from that of Queensland. For one thing, sandstone is a popular building material in Sydney as it's abundant. This is a functioning hospital that was built in the 18th century, and looks quite similar to the architecture of the southern US to me. This is the most beautiful hospital I've ever seen!
Another photo from the hospital courtyard.
This is a cafe that's just one tiny room that you walk up to a window to order. It was closed when we walked by.
This building is the department of land, built in the late 19th century. The same architect built several government buildings in colonial Sydney, all of which are of the classical style like this.
We were starving after our walk through the city and went back to Circular Quay to eat lunch with a harbor view.
We walked the opposite way along the boardwalk after lunch on our way to the historical Rocks neighborhood and saw some more street performers.
One of those performers was a contortionist who chose Sev as her assistant!
Obviously she uses her gig as a pick-up for possible dates!
Her grand finale was to climb into a tiny box on stilts.
It was pretty cool to watch her with the Opera House in the background!
The Rocks is where the original group of criminals landed from England and settled. It still has a historic, Eurpoean look to it.
We went to The Rocks Discovery Musem.
The museum includes history of the Aboriginal people who lived there before the English settlers came. These are arrows they used to spear fish with.
Weapons made from rocks. Sev really got a kick out of the naked drawings as well.
The museum also includes artifacts from original settlers. These are personal items from a man who was sent to Sydney for making counterfeit money in England, and it tells almost his whole life story through his items.
Original clothes from The Rocks settlers.
This is the outside of the Rocks Discovery Museum, which was built in the mid 19th century.
Another example of plantation style architecture, this is a historic apartment building.
There were a few cute alleyways like this in The Rocks.
This is The Argyle Cut, as it's on Argyle St. and is a tunnel that was cut out of sandstone by convicts between 1843 and 1867 to join Sydney Cove with Darling Harbour.
Actually, convicts started the project with chisels and hammers but it was finished by professionals with explosives in the end. These lines are caused from drills during the work with explosives.
The Rocks was quite a seedy area until a plague forces health officials to clean it up in the early 20th century. This hotel claims to be Sydney's oldest hotel, but Lonely Planet says another one in the neighborhood is older.
The brown brick building is a historic hotel that doesn't look like it's changed much in 100 years!
We saw about 7 weddings in the matter of 20 minutes, all taking photos in The Rocks. It's a beautiful historic area for pictures, but on one street there were 4 wedding parties in a row taking pictures!
On Sunday, we took a guided tour of the Opera House and learned why it's so famous, besides being aesthetically amazing!
The Opera House designer was the winner of a contest for a new performing arts center in 1957 named Jorn Utzon, from Denmark.
Being built entirely over the water, the Opera house has about 300 degree views of the harbor! This also created challenges in the construction, of course.
Townhomes across the harbor from the Opera House.
It's hard to imagine how large the harbor is in photos, but this help a bit.
The harbor is very busy with transport, cruises, and personal vessels. It also has resident bull sharks.
The Opera House is actually a performing arts center. It has performances of all kinds, and is one of the busiest performing arts centers in the world, with an average of 7 shows per day year round! We also saw a wedding here this weekend!
Construction was supposed to take 3 years and 3 million dollars, and in the end it took 16 years and 110 million dollars! It was finally opened in 1973.
The original design was just a rough hand sketch, and construction was started without verification that it was possible to build.
There was practice for a girls choir that had about 400 members the day we were there. They were practicing in the largest hall, which seats about 2,700 people. There are 7 venues in the Opera House that seat between 400 and 2,700 people.
We weren't able to take pictures of the inside of the concert halls, but they mostly have this hard wood on the outside and seats made of a soft wood inside to help with the acoustics. They also don't have a center aisle because apaprently sound would just travel up that aisle to the back of the hall if there was an aisle.
The Opera House became more and more controversial during construction as it dragged on and the budget grew. Construction was almost abandoned as engineers struggled for years to find a way to build the design, and at the last minute the architect came up with a plan to make the roof out of strips of concrete, like these, instead of one molded piece.
The roof is ivory tile that cleans itself when it rains.
After our Opera House tour, we took the ferry to Manly beach, which is an affluent beach area just outside downtown Sydney. One great thing about Sydney is that there are very nice beaches within the city, like this one.
The Manly ferry port seems almost as busy as the Sydney central port!
Manly has about 4 main beaches and some smaller, more secluded ones as well.
