Today we got up and made a coffee run, and then came back to the room so Scotty could do a little work. After that, we vowed to make today our super-touristy gawking day and headed out to Hyde Park, where we saw our first white ibis. By the end of our walks through Hyde Park and the botanic gardens, we’d probably seen twenty of them. We were later told that they’re basically rats. Beautiful, exotic rats.
We made our way up past the old barracks and the mint and other government buildings until we reached the Domain, which used to be the colonial governor’s private park. We wandered through the park, gawping at all the strange trees and flowering bushes, and made our way down to the harbor, approaching the Opera House from the east.
Like all landmark buildings, it’s a little smaller than you expect in person, but beautiful. I never knew that the white is all tile, and that it is actually several somewhat separate buildings that look like conquistador helmets.
We stared at the Harbour Bridge for a while too.
We then took a long, uphill footbridge to The Rocks, wandered through the very crowded Saturday Market, and eventually found one of the oldest pubs in Sydney, the Hero of Waterloo, where we had lunch out on the sidewalk with big, cold, Aussie beers. I had a great burger with pickled beets on it. From there we went up the hill to the Sydney Observatory. We might go back for a night tour later, so that we can look through their 40 cm telescope and see all the constellations that us topsiders never get to see at home. We lounged around in the park afterwards and then made our way back to the hotel for a disco nap.
The bridge from the Observatory park:
The evening turned out to be pretty eventful. We started out with the plan to go check out a couple of arcades near the hotel. The first one was pretty average, and we played some Dance Dance Revolution and Mortal Kombat and got out of there. We thought it was a little weird that the whole first floor was filled with rip-off crane games, and that dozens of young Japanese kids were going bonkers over them. We decided to head southeast toward Surry Hills for some food and a drink. On the way we saw another arcade up above some Asian restaurants, and went in to see what it was like. HOLY. CRAP. It was amazing. It was ALL crane games, but with huge, hilarious, anime- and video game-inspired prizes. Anything that wasn’t a crane game was a highly exotic photo booth plastered with pictures of teenage rock and roll Japanese princesses surrounded by sparkles and shooting stars, with all the instructions in Japanese only. And they were huge. We walked through a tunnel made out of at least a dozen booths. We really are very, very close to Japan.
We continued our trek toward Surry Hills, but just as we crossed into the neighborhood we noticed a man lying in the middle of the road on a side street. Scotty called out to ask if he was ok, and the man seemed very disoriented and asked us to call an ambulance, saying that his chest hurt. We saw a restaurant up on the corner and went in to find out how to get help for the guy. One of the employees came down the street with us and told us how to call for the ambulance, and he and Scotty talked to the man until the ambulance showed up. The ambulance driver was an extremely cheerful blonde woman, who jumped right out, recognized the man in the street and said, “Hey Tony! How you doin’, mate? You need to come in for a sleep?” He nodded yes, ands she turned to us and said, “No worries, I know Tony. We’re mates.” As she helped Tony up into the ambulance, the restaurant employee, whose name was David, invited us back to the restaurant for a glass of wine. There we met Myra, the owner, and ended up staying there for a couple hours talking to the two of them, drinking wine, and snacking on some spicy meatballs and couscous. Myra comes from a family of architects, so we discussed Walter Burley Griffin and his wife, Marion, two Americans formerly associated with Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed parts of Canberra and several buildings around Australia, and whose notebooks were owned by my library at the Art Institute of Chicago. David gave us a lot of background on Australian politics and culture. It was a very good night, and we promised to come back and have breakfast there sometime.
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