Australia Part I: Sydney

I'm scared to think of what may have happened to the readership of this blog in the past month, given that I've been traveling and doing other stuff during that time. Perhaps the number of readers has shrunk from 3 to 2?

So what have I been doing all this time? Surprisingly, I have not been watching much football. I did go visit some family in Orange County right around the time the fires were blazing. And I also went to New York City for a wedding, and hung out with the famous yoga mime (aka Skinny Indian) for a bit.

But for the past three weeks, the Wacky Chinawife and I have been traveling in Australia. What a beautiful country! The locals were quite friendly and fun-loving, the cities were clean, and though the cuisine was very average, the food was very good.

We kept a very long, detailed travel journal to help us remember this trip, and though I won't post it here, I'll try and recap the highlights in this space over the next several days.

The first thing we did was land in Sydney and check into our hotel, which overlooked the Circular Quay (pronounced "Key"), which is smack in the middle of Sydney. Sydney is quite a big place, with a fair amount of places to see, so we stayed here for nearly a week. Here's a picture of the Quay at night:



The first thing we did was make the obligatory visit to the Sydney Opera House and take a tour. To me, this is pretty much the big symbol of Sydney. It's quite a nice building, with an interesting history, and great views out of the rear balcony, but it wasn't particularly exciting.

That same day, we took a bus out to Bondi Beach, where an outdoor sculpture exhibit was on display all along the cliffs overlooking the beach. As with most art (especially modern art like this), there were some things that sucked and some things that were cool. My favorite piece was this one of the giant ants on top of the car. If you look closely, you'll see that the ants are made entirely out of car parts (notice how the antennae are made from windshield wipers).



That's just the first day. More in a future post...