Our second week in Australia (SUMMARY)

[yesthattom]

Our second week in Australia was spent in Sydney. Here's the summary:

Saturday:

• Arrive at Sydney airport
• Walked around "Darling Harbour", which is about a block from the hotel. Damn it's nice. There's a street fair and tons to see. Lots for the kids :-).
• We ate dinner at "Zenbu", a fusion restaurant. I had some kind of beef thing and it was ok, but I forgot that fusion means "small portions"
• We saw 2 IMAX films: Cirque de Soleil & Spacestation 3D. The IMAX is 2 blocks from our hotel. Sweet! SpaceStation 3D is real footage from the International Space Station and space shuttle.
• We looked all over for dance club listings. In particular, we wanted to find a particular D.J: Kate Monroe. A number of places mentioned her.
• We went to the hotel for a while then went to a club called "Home". Dancing was hot and sexy. Lots of good looking people. (There's a funny story here. "Home" doesn't list an address on any of their adverts, just the GPS coordinates. However, it did say it was in Darling Harbour, so we figured we'd walk around and find it. Ta-da, it was the first building once we got there. Considering that there was a line to get in, we figured it couldn't be all that bad. We were right!)

Sunday:

• We ate brunch at this food court near the hotel. Unlike American food courts, this one had many, many mom-and-pop restaurants. All of which were really amazing. Oh, and 3 of them had gelato. I had two scoops: chocolate hazelnut and mango. It was unseasonably warm for winter in Sydney (70-75 degrees F); lots of people out in the sun.
• The afternoon was spent on a bus tour of the city. We went all over. Our tour guide gave us some basic history of the convicts landing & the convict-turned-architect (now featured on currency... oh, and I should point out that he was convicted for forgery), and pointed to the ‘isolation island’ where the more troublesome convicts were kept. He showed us a chair cut into a sandstone formation in a park where Mrs M sat (with an aid and her horseman on either side) "overlooking" her husband's construction projects going on across the water. We later realized that more likely she was a busy-body and he needed to find a way to keep her out of everyone's hair. This way she felt needed yet was kept far from the projects. Another interesting point was Bondi Beach, home of the first ever lifeguard squad (1906). It was all-volunteer.
• At night we went to Chinatown, also near our hotel. We ate at "Noble Dragon". The food was excellent. So much better than in the U.S. No mass-produced stuff, things seemed to be hand-cut and fresh.

Monday:

• Full day bus tour out to the Blue Mountains (the blue color is due to eucalyptus oil in the air). This tour guide wasn't as good as yesterday's. However we did have a good time. In particular, we went to a wildlife preserve and petted koalas & saw wombats & a tasmanian devil & several varieties of kangaroo (including a baby that seemed to have fallen out of a pouch). Oh, and we saw "the three sisters", which is a rock formation. The train cars to see it go at a 52 degree angle down the mountain. It was wicked fun. Quite chilly in the mountains--about twenty degrees (F) cooler than in the city. The bus drove through Olympic Park on the way back into the city.
• We had the bus drop us in the gay part of town so we could find good indian food. The place we found (Tandori Palace) was excellent. They screwed up and returned my credit card to someone else, but we resolved that 2 days later.

Tuesday:

• I don't have many notes for today. I think that means we went shopping.
• There was some confusion in the morning about what day it was. Initially we thought it was Wednesday, but eventually settled on Tuesday (and confirmed by looking at the date on the receipt for something we bought). We ate at the cool food court again. Did some souvenir shopping at Darling Harbor.
• We took the ferry out to Manly & looked around Manly for a few minutes before taking the return trip. It was an inexpensive way to see the harbor & the weather was still great. Yes, we took "the manly ferry". I'll let you write your own joke.
• At night we ate dinner at "Temple of Love". Fusion thai food with a HUGE budda statue at the entrance. Excellent food, and I usually dislike thai :-)

Wednesday:

• Phone fixed. Yes, my rented cell phone wasn’t working and for days I couldn’t reach the company because they are in California--the timezone that is perfectly wrong for anyone trying to call from Australia. They ignored my email. When I finally reached someone there, the problem was fixed within 30 minutes.
• We saw two more IMAX films.
• Shackelton's Arctic Adventure -- excellent! In 1914 nearly 30 people spent two years failing to get to the south pole. No, seriously, the story is much more interesting than that.
• Cyberworld 3D -- pretty good. They got access to the raw datafiles from many famous computer generated films (a scene from Antz, the 3d scene from The Simpsons, and a few others) and re-generated them in IMAX 3D (we had to wear the goggles). It was great. It would have been fantastic if I hadn’t seen the scenes already. I hope this is successful so that it encourages them to do original content this way.
• Walked around the big city park with enormous ficus trees, then walked back to the hotel without using a map. Wow, it’s like we’re locals now.
• Souvenir shopping -- had to buy stuff for all our friends back home. Oh, and we found a store that sells used adult books.
• Umbilical Brothers performance at the Sydney Opera House. I’ve seen them do stuff on TV, but they were excellent live. Imagine mime with sound effects and a lot of talking.

Thursday:

• We spent the day walked around Sydney, shopping (australian wine, violet crumble), etc.
• We spent a lot of time taking pictures around a cool fountain near our hotel.
• We went back to the Indian restaurant for lunch & to retrieve credit card.
• Back to Chinatown for dinner with local SAGE-AU chapter. Excellent duck appetizer. Drinks afterward at a local haunt of a couple SAGE members (a cozy hotel lounge). Very cute bartender.

Friday:

• Woke up and packed.
• Flew home.

Saturday:

• Picnic at Mike & Sherry’s house

(note: Thanks to Ying for helping me remember some of the names, locations, and activities)

Comments

[lovingboth]

Oh yes, the Umbilical Brothers are good. I saw Don't Explain and Heaven By Storm ages ago and am currently going 'oooh' at the prospect of their next visit to the UK.

Over Christmas, UK TV had a very good two part film on Shackelton's incredible Antarctic expedition, staring Kenneth Branagh. Worth looking out for on US TV. So much happened that it's still just the highlights - towards the end, climbing over some previously unclimbed mountains with no equipment is dealt with in a minute or two!