Day 87 - Sydney

  Sydney, Australia
Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Eric asked us to be ready for a visit from the plumber at 8am, which was fine as I was up early and took the chance to upload some photos onto the blog.

Eric & Julie have an iMac, which is a phenomenal piece of kit, but a little bit tricky to operate when you're used to PCs! Simple things like shortcuts, or right-clicking on a mouse cause COMPLETELY different results on Macs, so it was a bit of a struggle but I got there in the end. Sort of.

Before we left, and as it was a nice day, I took a photo from Eric's lounge, looking over the harbour. Let me tell you, I wouldn't mind waking up with THIS view every morning... yowzers.



After that I made an appointment to meet one of my ex-colleagues from Tie Rack, read with interest an email from my friend Ju detailing England captain John Terry's extraordinary behaviour at a lapdancing bar in London, and dealt with the (incredibly well-dressed and polite) plumber.

The first thing we had to do today was to drop off our super-deluxe executive car, which we've grown quite attached to after more than 2 weeks!

Our Panasonic digital camera has not worked properly since Noosa (the shutter doesn't open even though the lense does), so I spent about 2 hours trawling the streets of central Sydney, tracking down the list of camera repair shops I'd found on Google, and not really liking what they told me.

The best quote I had was A$200 (85 quid) for a 7 day repair! That's not much good when we leave Sydney on Saturday, but the guy was quite helpful and said he'd do his best to get his boss to have it ready for Friday when we leave town. He didn't guarantee anything, but fingers crossed...

We then grabbed some lunch, Katie found somewhere to have her eyebrows threaded (bit of a nightmare apparently), and we walked down to the QVB (Queen Victoria Building) to meet Stephen, my old MD for Oz & Asia.



Stephen was always one of my favourite people to work with in my old company, his dry wit enlivened many a boring conference call, and it was really good to meet him without needing to discuss fashion accessories or luggage! ;)



We had a really good catch-up with him over a coffee (including the time a rat interupted a meal in our honour hosted by the Malaysian airport authority!), and half an hour later set off to explore the city a bit more.

First stop for me was to buy some Havaianas (posh flip-flops, or 'thongs' as the Aussies amusingly call them), because my £4 Uniqlo legends are now about as comfortable as walking barefoot. Katie bought a white pair and I bought a black pair, so we now have some his & her's footwear action, which is clearly a bit dodge.

After that we meandered in & out of various retail establishments, only really dwelling for any time in a place selling Aboriginal art, which was pretty special. Smelling a sale, we were practically jumped on by the (very good) staff, whose eyes must light up when they hear English accents!

I managed to talk Katie out of all manner of extremely expensive but attractive objets d'art, mainly paintings, but stalled when it came to their collection of didjeridoos, because, well, they're really kinda cool.

The prices were still horendous (especially on top of the camera repair!), so I managed to put Katie into what in air traffic control parlance would be refered to as a 'holding pattern', and managed to get her out of the shop without buying anything. Hopefully she'll have forgotten all about it tomorrow, but knowing Katie...

We made a quick diversion to Hyde Park, a lovely little bit of green parkland right in the centre of the city, which was very popular with the locals to eat their lunch.

 

It's only a fraction of the size of London's Hyde Park, but it has some beautiful big trees which provide loads of shade, it's a nice place to chill out.

 

After that we headed for the harbour, which looked amazing in the sunshine.

We walked through Circular Key (home to a multitude of ferry services leaving the harbour), walked up to the Opera House, into the Botanical Gardens, and back up the steep hill to The Rocks.

This little walk gave us great views of 3 of Sydney's great landmarks:

The harbour bridge:



...the city skyline...



...and the Opera House.



We wandered around the outside of the Opera House, which is an incredible building, and not as white as it seems on camera, it's actually a sort of eggshell colour.

We probably should have gone inside, but we decided to make the most of the sunshine as we haven't had much over here!



From there I managed to second my wife into a sojourn across the bridge, which really helped frame the opera house and the skyscraper skyline quite nicely.



We walked over the span of bridge to the 'North Shore', and walked down to Lunar Park, a small and vintage amusement park which is supposed to be good fun.

Naturally with our incredible good luck it was closed today, they had closed to prepare for their "Movember" event tonight, which regular readers will know is an initiative aimed at promoting awareness of, and raising money for, prostrate cancer among Aussie males by sponsoring guys to grow moustaches.

 

Lunar Park is most famous for the huge clown's face which you see from the harbour, and which you need to walk through to access the rides.

The cool thing was that for the "Movember" event tonight we watched workmen (ineptly) attaching a moustache ("mo" to the Aussies, naturally) to the aforementioned clown's face! Clever... 

Lunar Park also has provided some views of the bridge from the other side, looking back to the opera house & the city...



We then wandered back up to the bridge again, and this is the view from just before the nearest train station to Lunar Park, looking back on this beautiful bridge from the North Shore.



We decided to take the train back into town, stopping off at Kings Cross station to do some emailing/blogging and then met Eric back at his flat for a good old Aussie barbie. Strewth!

It was dark when we got back, and Eric's place had a lovely view over Sydney by night. 



We grabbed some beers from the local bottle shop (I found a delicious 6 pack of 'James Squire' Porters and Katie is a big fan of Toohey's Extra Dry), and then spent the next 2 hours accidentally distracting Eric from his preparations via various inane conversational topics!

Eventually he managed to finish the barbie and we sat down to plates of veal & tuna plate, topped off with some local oysters! This was not your average barbie, mate ;)

After the food we left Eric to study for his exams, and tried not to distract him.

Today was a real 'city day', so tomorrow we hope to have an 'activity day', taking a ferry to Manly beach, a trip to the Sydney Zoo, maybe even the Aquarium, and hopefully taking in the amazing views from the Sky Tower.

All in all today was a bit of a lazy day (by our standards!) so we'll try to whizz round a bit more tomorrow, weather permitting of course, which certainly can't be taken for granted here at the moment...

Hope all is well where you are, lots of love,


Al & Katie xx