Saturday morning, we headed into town, arriving at the Rocks at midday. With his camera having been recently nabbed by his parents on a trip to inland Australia, I had to purchase a one-use disposable camera, which accounts for the quality of some photos below. Not all the photos below are taken with the disposable camera - some are nabbed from tourist sites or postcards, because their photos show better detail of the places we visited.

After wandering around the market at the Rocks for some time, we decided to go see the sights and headed off to the Sydney Harbour Bridge to do the big “touristy” thing. We were aiming at the museum set in one of the supports of the bridge, but ended up standing 100 feet below it, with no way of getting up without going all the way back. We decided that we’d come back to it later rather than backtrack at that time. As it turned out, we never made it back to the museum, but we did see the bridge from up close anyway.

From the bridge, we went to the other most-photographed place in Sydney - the Opera House. Both Di and I have often heard that it is most impressive on the outside, and quite drab inside, but we never realised the accuracy of that comment until we visited. The inside is plain concrete, with no decorations, and the metal rods in the concrete are still visible for the world to see. Seems a real shame to spoil the grandeur of the outside by having it so raw and rough inside…

There were performances all afternoon, so we decided not to go on one, because instead of seeing inside four theatres, we’d only have seen the outside doors and been told to be quiet because there was a concert on inside. We went outside and found some bad street theatre - some form of interpretative dance about a prison, from which some prisoners escaped after one of them had a dream and when he woke up, there was a flag. All very odd, and completely confusing, so we headed off to find more mainstream entertainment.

Before we leave the topic of street-entertainers, I should just point out that there were some rather odd ones indeed. The first odd person we encountered was preceded by us hearing belly-dancing music. We could see someone dancing around about 50m ahead of us, but it was not until we got closer that we realised it was not a female belly-dancer clad in the appropriate garb, but in fact a 35-40yo male, fully clothed in T-shirt and jeans dancing around as though he was a belly dancer. Hmm…

Following that character, we kept walking and found someone dressed as a donkey with a couple of bells around it’s neck. The person was standing on all fours, which must have been pretty hard to maintain, but at least they looked more like a donkey than they would have if they’d stood on two feet. The whole act for this person consisted of shaking it’s head to make the bells ring. We figured that when someone donated some money, it would dance or something, but no. It just rang it’s bells a little harder for half a second then resumed it’s regular standing/ringing pattern. Pretty hard to stand in that position, and not much of an act, but still managed to rake in several dollars within the five minutes we watched.

Heading into the city, we climbed up Centrepoint Tower, which is the tallest structure in Sydney, affording a 360-degree panorama of the city and bay. Quite interesting, and better than the Rialto Towers in Melbourne, on the grounds that the telescopes in Sydney are free, compared to a $1 fee in Melbourne.

Our friend was off to a charity ball that evening, so Di and I were left to our own devices to find dinner. We jumped on the train to the next suburb - Parramatta - and went to a place called “Alexander’s” for dinner. No problems with giving them a plug, since the total bill came to just under $50 for two people eating three courses, plus drinks, to the point of being uncomfortably bloated.

After dinner, we strolled the streets of Parramatta a little, until we got scared of the gangs hanging about, and so scampered back to the relative safety of the train station, where we caught a ride home, and sat drinking (gee, we sound like alcoholics, don’t we?) until late.

Categories: Travel, Sydney 1999