This was something of an open day for us in Sydney. I had planned to spend time in Darling Harbour, a neighborhood not far from the hotel, but from what I’d seen on the web and from driving through on the Viking bus I was not highly impressed. The weather forecast was not helpful, calling for a chance of drizzly rain or possibly dry, cool winds all day. It was dry when we woke up but soon started spitting a light rain. So, we improvised a bit.
Before leaving the room, we considered our newest ship docked below, the Ovation of the Seas from Royal Caribbean. It featured an observation bubble on an elevating crane that looked unique, at least.
I took the opportunity to film the building under construction across the street from our hotel at One Circular Quay. It would be interesting to see what it becomes, in case we ever come back. The day before we noticed a whole bunch of the construction workers staring intently at one of the floors below us in the Four Seasons. We figured someone was putting on an interesting show with the curtains raised.
After our breakfast we walked through The Rocks Markets, several streets of weekend pop up stalls selling all sorts of artsy knick knacks and some food. It didn’t take us very long to plow through them.
We stopped for a better look at the First Impressions statue we had seen two evenings before when we had dinner at The Rocks Cafe. The statue pays tribute to three groups that founded Sydney: the convicts, the soldiers and the settlers. It’s a good piece of urban art, and included more detail on each group but it was hard to get a photo of the text which blended into the sandstone. The internet to the rescue (after some digging on my part): here is the text for the three groups. The statue’s text was more succinct than The Sydney Museum at linking the founding of Australia in 1788 to the loss of the American colonies in 1783 — the British really needed someplace to send their convicts. It also laid out the growth of immigration over the next decades: convicts far outnumbered free immigrants before 1830 (63,000 to 14,000); from 1830-1850 the numbers began to flip (83,000 convicts and 173,000 free immigrants); the gold rushes of 1851-1860 (right on the heels of the California gold rush) swelled Australia’s population to over one million.
We headed north into town so Barb could see the main downtown shopping district. We poked into the National Opal Collection, a quasi-museum but mainly an opal store. The rest of the shopping district didn’t take long. The busier it got, the faster Barb seemed to go. She wasn’t interested in looking for anything in particular, not even in the busy Queen Victoria Building.
We walked over to Hyde Park, then to the Anzac Memorial. We spent a while in their displays honoring the exploits of the Australian Army, Navy, Air Corps, and support services in missions around the world. Barb spoke with a staffer and learned that Australia interred German citizens during both World War I and World War II, something we hadn’t realized.
We looked for signs of preparations for the Pride Parade which started from this corner of Hyde Park a few hours later in the day. There was little to be seen other than a row of food trucks, including the Rolling Schnitzel, getting ready.
The weather stayed misty so we ducked into the Australian Museum for a few hours. The museum was very busy with families on a weekend outing. It was also a hodgepodge of natural and human history, with everything from dinosaurs to minerals to stuffed animals of all sorts to collections of aboriginal and Pacific Island artifacts and 100 significant Australians. It wore us out rather quickly. I did learn that kangaroos and wallabies are basically the same species, “the difference is just a matter of size.” I decided I’m more of a wallaby fan. In general, Barb was amazed at the number and variety of stuffed animals in the museum.
By 2:30pm we were pretty much done. We walked back to the shopping district to catch a tram back to Circular Quay. We didn’t properly figure out the tap in, tap out sequence so basically got a free ride for the few stops (don’t tell Sydney). We went to a food court near Circular Quay where I got a lamb gozleme and Barb got some McDonalds fries. Lunch of champions!
We retired to our room for an afternoon rest. The weather did not improve, even as the Royal Caribbean Ovation of the Seas departed around 6pm.
We headed back upstairs to the club for drinks and the appetizer buffet for dinner before settling into our room to watch the Sydney Mardi Gras Pride Parade on TV rather than venturing out in the rain. The parade was a 3 hour procession of nearly 200 community groups/floats and something like 15,000 marchers representing every conceivable variety of the rainbow and allies. It was generally very good-natured but there was the pall of a very recent police killing of two gay men in Sydney. The broadcast flipped back and forth from being irreverent and serious. I watched the whole show while Barb was mostly engrossed in a book. It was something to do and educational about all sorts of subcultures I didn’t know much about (asexuals, furries, bears, Dykes on Bikes and so much more).
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