Perth February 19

Thursday, February 19

Off to the airport this morning for the 4 ½ hour flight to Perth, the capitol of Western Australia and about as far from Rochester, NY on land as you can be.  Perth is 20 miles upstream on the Swan River from Fremantle, on the Indian Ocean coast and the site of the America’s Cup race in the 1980s.  Another three-hour time change!

In the afternoon we toured Kings Park and the enormous and quite wonderful botanical gardens.  Here’s a view of Perth from the gardens:

We had a great docent take us on a walk through the gardens for well over an hour, where she showed us many varieties of trees and plants which we do not have at home.   Here’s one, the grass tree:

There are also birds we don’t have.  I got this photo of one I haven’t yet had identified.  Anyone know what it is?

Perth has a wonderful feel about it and extraordinarily friendly and upbeat people.  Despite being a city of over 2 million people, it is still, in many ways, a frontier town, isolated and with its own style.  The downtown is lovely with four free bus routes around the city, the busses running every 10 or 15 minutes!  It is impeccably clean with no litter anywhere.  The weather is gorgeous, sunny all the time (they average 8 hours of sunshine/day 365 days/year), and temperatures are in the 80’s with a great breeze.  They did have a heat wave last week, just before we arrived, with temperatures of 100!

We checked into our hotel and at 5:00 began a lecture on the history of Western Australia, which was fascinating.  The state is, by far, the largest state in Australia and accounts for about 1/3 of the land mass of Australia.  There’s been a gold rush, and currently export of minerals, especially iron ore, make up the large bulk of the economy.  There’s been a boom and bust economy which fluctuates far too frequently for comfort, and the Perth area has the highest proportion of millionaires of any city in the country.  

Of course it was now well after 8 PM Sydney time, and I’m afraid much information didn’t stick in my memory.  We had dinner after the lecture and off to bed!

Koalas and Tosca February 18

Wednesday, February 18

Up early for an 8:00 lecture on the trains of Australia.  More than I ever thought I wanted to know about the trains of Australia, but when a lecturer is entertaining and makes the material interesting, well I was intrigued.  There’s a fascinating history, especially of the gauges, and it wasn’t possible to go all the way across Australia on one train until the 1960’s.  He made it fun to learn!

We then went to the Sydney zoo, located on a hillside across the bridge from downtown.  Cleverly designed, you start at the top and walk down past extremely well-done exhibits.  We spent all of our time on the fauna indigenous to Australia, and had a great time! 

Who knew there is such a thing as a tree kangaroo?

Australia has giant pelicans:

But everyone’s favorites were the koalas.  These absolutely adorable non-bears live in trees and sleep 20 hours a day!  They eat only the fresh new-grown leaves of the eucalyptus tree.  We saw a number:

Of course there were lots of kangaroos and their cousin marsupials, wallabies which are a bit smaller and have different shaped faces.  Here’s a pregnant kangaroo:

Resting kangaroos:

And wallaby:

There’s an evolutionarily fascinating pair of animals unique to Australia which are egg-laying mammals: the duck-billed platypus and the spiny anteater.  They belong to a class of animals called monotremes and while they have mammary glands they don’t have nipples.  They probably represent a link between reptiles and true mammals, and their story is fascinating.  I was unable to get a good photo of the duck-billed platypus, but here’s one of the spiny anteater:

We had a reptile demonstration:

After lunch at the zoo we took the ferry back to the Sydney Bay area and spent a couple of hours shopping.  Australia is known for its opals, and we had a shop recommended to us where Joyce got a lovely pair of opal earrings. 

Back to the hotel for an early dinner and then Tosca at the Opera House.  We had wonderful seats, 16^th row orchestra just right of center.  This production placed Tosca in 1943 German-occupied Rome, and it worked quite well and didn’t feel forced.  The production was absolutely wonderful!  My only complaint was that the tenor playing Cavaradossi, one Diego Torre, looked as if he weighed 350 lbs. and his obesity interfered with his ability to move.  His acting was poor and his love duets with Tosca were not believable (she couldn’t reach her arms around him), but his voice was spectacular.  Scarpia as a sadistic Nazi officer really played well—there’s amazing evil always, isn’t there.  It was an extremely enjoyable production with great singing, great acting and beautiful sets.  The orchestra was terrific and the conductor, Nicholas Milton, had everything under great control.  A real treat.  It was a sell-out; interesting that it’s a mid-summer season.  In the USA we have symphony, ballet and opera out of the big cities in the summer.

Back to the hotel after 11:00 PM, up early tomorrow as we need to pack.  We leave for the airport at 8 AM after breakfast for our flight to Perth where it’s 3 hours earlier.  So if we get up at 6:00 it will be as if we got up at 3:00 AM.  Huh!  More then.

Sydney Harbour and the Opera House; February 17

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

A busy day!  We began with a very well-done lecture on the history and geography of Australia, given by a professor of history from the University of Western Sydney.  He crammed an enormous amount of information into a long hour, and was excellent.  He also gave us an introduction to the history of railroads in Australia so that we have some idea of what the trains we’ll be taking derived from.

We then took a long boat tour of much of Sydney Harbor, which has a shoreline of 240 km.  There was a narrated commentary which was very helpful, and the whole thing is very well done.  The views from the boat were striking.  Here’s a panorama of the city:

There is a very large number of extraordinary homes on the water, many with a great view of downtown, the bridge and the opera house.  Here’s one:

After lunch at a local restaurant, we had a walking tour of the area called “The Rocks” which was an early settled part of Sydney, now mostly shops and restaurants.  Yet remnants of colonial Australia remain, such as this series of stores called “Candle Stores” after the man who built them.  A long story, including stories of Captain Bligh, the same Captain who was mutinied on the Bounty.

Chinese New Year is coming up, and the city is full of events and exhibits celebrating.  Here’s a small army of Chinese lanterns in the form of the terracotta warriors:

Finally we walked to the Opera House where we had an extensive private tour for our group.  We saw two videos about the design and construction and walked the whole complex.  It’s an astonishing story, which begins in 1955 with the conductor Eugene Goosens (conductor of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra from 1923-1931) who was at the time conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and dreamt of a special concert hall for his orchestra.  There were 233 plans submitted to the jury selected to pick the winner, and the famous architect Eero Saarinen who was on the jury, arrived late to the deliberations.  The jury had discarded all but a small number of submissions, all of which Saarinen found very ordinary.  He retrieved the discarded submissions, found this very daring one from the Danish architect Joern Utzon, and persuaded the jury to select it even though it was mostly sketches and not at all developed.  The budget for construction was $7 million, and the timetable 3 years.  The story goes on and on, but ultimately it was deemed unbuildable.  Finally, in consultation with the engineer Arove Arup, a building plan was developed using cast concrete ribs with the “sails” being formed of parts of spheres.  Before it was complete, Utzon left, and it took 16 years and $102 million to get it done.

It is spectacular.  Unbelievably spectacular.  There are two primary large music halls, one for symphony (2690 seats) and one, named for Dame Joan Sutherland, for opera (1547 seats).  There are three smaller spaces for theater performances.  We’ll be attending a performance of Tosca tomorrow night.

Here are some of the more than 20,000 ribs:

Here are the tiles on the outside:

Here is the public area of the symphony hall (somewhat like the bridge of a ship):

And here is the inside of the symphony hall

The opera theater looks just like the symphony hall but smaller.

It was a wonderful and extraordinary tour which gave us a great insight into the creation of what the Aussies say is the most recognized building in the world.  It could be!

Off to dinner in Chinatown.  More tomorrow.

Darling Harbour Feb. 16

February 16, 2015

This morning after breakfast we checked out of our hotel and moved to the group hotel which is on Darling Harbor, a cove just west of the cove we had been on previously.  Many of the 23 people traveling on this Road Scholar trip came in on an overnight flight from Los Angeles and arrived at the airport at 9:00 AM.  They toured some of the southern suburbs (including Bondi Beach) on the way to the hotel, and we all met for lunch at 1:00.  It seems like a congenial group, but some people were so tired that it was hard to see the personalities. 

After lunch we took a long walking tour of Darling Harbor.  This area is not nearly as upscale as the area where we’d been, but it looks like that will be changing soon as there is a massive building project underway to build a world-class convention center right on the harbor.  We were told the cost will be 3 Billion Australian dollars.  Wow.  Of course that’s only 2.3 Billion US. 

Here’s a current view of the harbor:

You can see a bridge across the harbor which used to be the major road, but a highway alongside the harbor has replaced it and the old bridge has become a pedestrian bridge:

  

After walking the harbor we walked into downtown, and came to the QVB about which I wrote yesterday.  I hadn’t been able to get a good photo of the outside but I was today:

There’s a wonderful story about wanting a statue of Queen Victoria to honor her and to mark the site, and finding one stashed away, not on view, in a small Irish town (where the monarchy is not in favor).  They were happy to unload it and get some money, and the Aussies got a nice statue for little cost.

We’ll have dinner together soon, and then there are no plans for the evening in sympathy with the folks who just arrived.  We do start with an after-breakfast lecture at 8 AM tomorrow, however.  More then.

More Sydney Feb. 15

Sunday, February 15, 2015

Today Susan and Michael Moses spent the day taking us to places in Sydney which we had not seen and will not see with the group tour which we join tomorrow.  We began at the Jewish Museum:

Unfortunately, no photos are allowed inside.  The museum contains a wonderful history of the Jewish presence in Australia which dates back to the original prisoners exported from England.  The exhibit explains that history, including a wonderful and terrible listing of the people who came and the crimes of which they were convicted along with the sentences they received.  It was truly Dickensian.  14 years for receiving stolen property.  7 years for stealing a piece of clothing.  Multiple Les Miserables stories.

There is a very well-done Holocaust section and there are multiple personal stories.  One niche is devoted to the story of a young woman, with photos taken in Auschwitz.  She was there!  Now 91, she spends every Sunday sitting in front of the display about her, telling her story.  She is remarkable, and we listened to her tell her remarkable and tragic history.

From the Jewish Museum we went to the Sydney Fish Market.  This is truly astonishing; adjacent to the port where the fishing boats come in, it is enormous and jam-packed:

There is a large number of very big shops within the market.  Here’s the salmon section of one shop:

You can even buy just the heads and bones of whitefish—possibly for making gefilte fish?

We bought fish and chips and took our lunch outside where we ate in front of the harbor:

We then drove around an area called Balmain where there are wonderful homes with extensive iron work on porches and balconies very reminiscent of New Orleans.  Finally we wound up at QVB, the Queen Victoria Building, a fabulous example of re-purposing an historic building.  The outside is as it was when built in the 19^th c., but the inside has been transformed into trendy and expensive shops:

 So that was the wonderful day we had with Susan and Michael.  Tomorrow (Monday) we check out of our hotel and move to the group hotel where we’ll assemble for lunch.

Touring Sydney Feb. 14

Saturday, February 14

We spent the day today with Sheila and Peter Philippsohn who were so amazingly kind to set the whole day aside to show us Sydney.  We began by taking one of the ferries at the harbor to a stop near their home where they picked us up.  Of course there was yet another wonderful view of the opera house as we departed downtown Sydney. 

Our first stop was Vauclose House, the extensive home and gardens of William Charles Wentworth who bought the house in the early 19^th c. and expanded it and created wonderful gardens.  Wentworth was an early explorer and politician and the house and grounds are lovely:

Sydney Harbour is geographically very much like San Francisco Bay, enormous, with a narrow sea opening, so all the water within the bay is protected from the ocean.  We had noted multiple small coves and inlets on our ferry ride and we visited one, Parsley Bay, which is typical of many.  There is a fine sand beach with a park behind it which included a playground.  According to Sheila and Peter there are many small beach parks like this which are well used:

We drove up to Gap, a dramatic cliff over the ocean with a path to the top.  We walked the path which has been bordered by a very tall fence in an attempt to discourage the many suicides which have taken place here. 

From there we went to the headlands, the opening from the bay to the ocean.  This is the view from the South Head looking across to the north:

And then we went to famous Bondi Beach, a true happening place.  Bondi Beach is on the ocean, so there is surf and surfers as well as large numbers of people enjoying the amazingly fine sand. 

After lunch we drove further south to Botany Bay, another enormous bay which was actually the first landing place of Captain Cook.  As there was no fresh water there, he abandoned that site and moved north to what is now Sydney Harbor.  After looking at Botany Bay we went back towards downtown Sydney and walked the lovely Royal Botanic Gardens before resting for a couple of hours at our hotel and then going out again with Sheila and Peter for a delicious Lebanese dinner.

Peter has had a number of prominent leadership roles in the Sydney Jewish community and we drove past a number of Jewish schools and synagogues.  It was sobering to hear of the very large sums of money which have been spent on security for these sites, security which we at home in Rochester don’t feel the need for.  There are huge (and ugly) bomb-proof walls, extensive fencing and video systems, and armed guards at the schools and synagogues when they are in operation.  Often there are multiple armed guards for each facility.  We discussed the contrast between the openness of our Rochester schools, synagogues and our JCC and the intense level of security at similar sites here.  We were unable to conclude whether they’ve overdone things or whether we’re terribly naïve.  But it was a dramatic contrast.

Sydney Feb. 13

Friday, February 13, 2015  Sydney

The flight was uneventful if long; Delta had a problem with the entertainment system, so there was no video, no music, nothing but whatever people had brought with them.  Some families with children were not prepared to entertain them for 14 hours!  We arrived at Sydney airport at 8 AM and were at our hotel before 10:00.  Fortunately, our room was ready, and we were able to unpack, shower and wash up before going out.

We are located right at the harbor (or harbour if you wish) and the elevator to our room lets you out at the quay at its lowest level.  The harbor is bustling!  Ferries leave for multiple points, the light rail/subway has a major station there, cruise ships dock there (and a giant Carnival ship was in port), and there is a good-natured atmosphere with lots of touristy shops, many cafes, some upscale shops, and vendors and performers. 

The iconic opera house is on a small peninsula which projects out from the curve of the harbor, and it is visible from everywhere, looking different from different perspectives:

We had lunch at a lovely outdoors café in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art:

Wandering after lunch we came across this diggery-doo street performer:

Finally we went back to our hotel, took a short nap, and went to dinner at the home of Sheila and Peter Philippsohn, friends from our Melton trips.  We were picked up and brought to dinner by Susan and Michael Moses, also Melton friends.  The Philippsohn home is gorgeous, on a hill in a suburb, and Peter’s study has a view of the harbor and the opera house.  The Philippsohn’s daughters, son-in law, and three grandsons were all there too, and it was a delightful Shabbat dinner with friends.  The Philippsohns will be showing us some of Sydney on Saturday and the Moseses will escort us on Sunday.  We’re so lucky!  We join our scheduled tour group on Monday.