Sydney, Australia (Day 2)

Technically speaking I'm posting this on the same day as my previous post, some fifteen hours later.  My blog thinks otherwise.  Time zones are just so much fun.

I have now been awake since 12:30 am local time.  Currently it is nearly 6:00 pm local time.  I'll be here for at least another half-hour, if not a whole hour, working to get these pictures up.  Slow internet is a killer.  Hopefully you enjoy all 36 pictures.

We set out around 9:30 am local time with the intention of walking through the Botanical Gardens to the Sydney Opera House.  We certainly took our time about it, as we didn't arrive until about 1 pm.  That and it was a pretty long walk.  We had our lunch at a point across a bay from the Opera House, at Mrs. Macquarie's point.  From there we could see the Opera House and the Sydney Bridge all in one beautiful panoramic view.  After spending some time there we walked along the shoreline to the Opera House and lay in the shade of it for a while (see pictures below).  The rest of the crew started singing "opera", so I slipped away to take pictures while they sang.  After they were done with that we started walking towards the bus as there is a free bus circuit that goes around right past our apartment building, and that's when the real fun began.

Just in front of the bus stop there was a pair of street performers just starting up, so we got a front row seat to this.  After the preliminary acts, consisting of "Psycho Sam" doing the robot (and very very well, I must say), and name-escapes-me, a contortionist, who managed to twist herself into some very painful looking positions.  Then they started getting the elaborate set-up started.  First they nabbed two likely looking men from the crowd to hold up a ten-foot ladder simply by pulling on some straps attached to the top, one on each side.  After some antics with these two guys Psycho Sam started casting about (pun maybe intended) for a younger child.  He goes through two kids before coming to Patrick, who, much to our surprise, stepped right up without hesitation.  Normally Patrick would be perfectly willing for stuff like that in a family setting but out in public, even with people we know, he shy as a mouse.  But not this time.  Psycho Sam, after getting Patrick's name, pulled out a ten dollar bill and explained that if Patrick did as he was told he would get this ten dollar bill at the end.  He then told Patrick to show how excited he was at the prospect of getting the ten dollars by jumping for joy.  Instantly Patrick starting jumping up and down waving his arms in the air, without waiting for Sam's lead.  Then Sam started moving to slightly more complex "jumps", the next one involving the kicking out of the legs in the jump.  Patrick imitates perfectly.  Then, Sam gets down and starts doing a little break dancing.  He then started moving on to the next part of the show, as he was obviously joking around, but he was interrupted by Patrick who had started imitating the break dance!  The crowd started cheering loudly at this point and the look on Sam's face was priceless.  Both he and the contortionist were in shock; they evidently do this routine a lot but Patrick was probably the first kid to follow through with the break dancing.  After getting over the surprise, he then started to ask Patrick to do increasingly ridiculous things.  After the dancing bit Sam led Patrick over to the ladder and told him that once he got to the top of the ladder he could have the ten dollars.  Remember, this is just a straight up ladder with no support except the two guys holding it with the straps.  Patrick instantly starts climbing and is about halfway up before Sam yanks him off the ladder as he probably didn't intend for Patrick to start climbing.  Finally, Sam pulls to the centre of the "stage" his juggling implements that have been lying in plain view the whole time, namely a juggling club, a large knife, and a torch.  He then tells Patrick that he is to throw him (Sam) the knife once he gets to the top of the ladder.  He demonstrates the proper throwing technique and carefully explains how not to throw it.  He then begins to hand Patrick the knife, which he reaches for right away, but then Sam yanked it away saying. "Not a chance."  He then gives Patrick the club and climbs up the ladder, and gets the crowd to count to three, at which point Patrick threw the club....straight up.  He recovered quickly enough and partially caught it on the way down, and then threw it right to Sam on his next throw.  Finally he got his ten dollars and came back to us quite proud of himself.

Also, as there were several people filming this performance I'd expect this to turn up on YouTube at some point.  If I come across it there I'll be sure to post the link to it here.

And finally, Patrick's street performance.  Unfortunately I didn't catch the actual break dancing.



Sydney, Australia

Whew.  After approximately 32 grueling hours of travel, the worst of which being the 15 hour flight from Vancouver to Sydney, we are here.  And certainly happy to be as such.

Currently I am sitting in an apartment on the seventy-fifth floor of this building.  There are large windows to my right which open up to a breath-taking panorama of the city.  In a mixture of good and bad luck these windows face west; good because the sunsets are amazing (corollary: if I'm awake to see them.  With this much of a time change after about 5 pm local time the body starts to shut down.), bad because the harbour, bridge and opera house are all east of our location.  The current local time is 2:20 AM, which probably begs the question of what am I doing awake?  Because I'm a good student who isn't going to let traveling to Australia and New Zealand interfere with attending classes that's why. :-P  I now have about an hour until my next class.

There's something I've noticed about traveling, especially via air.  It is that no matter what, no matter how careful you are to have all the right boxes ticked off, no matter how meticulously things are packed, no matter how careful you are to follow all the right signs to get to the right place at the right time, something will go wrong.

Take, for example, our dance in and out of customs in Toronto.  When we checked our bags in Bermuda, they were labeled with a bright, unmistakably neon pink tag in order to indicate that they were to go straight through to Sydney, thus making it unnecessary for us to collect them at Toronto, only to drop them off again 100 yards later (as we always have to do on our way to Montreal).  My mother, having worked for Air Canada in the past and thus is invaluable on trips (she knows how airlines work from the inside), was a little dubious about this, but as the check-in clerk went to a lot of trouble to tag these bags (it wasn't until half were sent along the conveyor belt that she realized she could tag them with these tags) we figured she knew what she was talking about.  We arrive in Toronto, and after a brief deliberation on whether or not to walk all the way to the end of the baggage collection hall to see if our bags were not there we decided that waiting around to confirm the absence of our baggage was probably a waste of our time.  That is, until 100 yards later when we walk through the "connections" area and my mother explains why a family of seven headed to Australia has no baggage.  The lady explained that no, our bags would not be routed straight through to Sydney, neon pink tag or no neon pink tag, and that we would have to collect them here in Toronto anyways, to which my mom commented that it made sense.  As we had already passed customs we could not simply walk into the baggage hall and grab our bags off the carousel, and as, due to some very questionable airport planning (do not get me started on this), we were now outside of security, we had to leave all our carry-on with these people while we were given an escort back into the baggage hall to collect our luggage.  All seven of us are sent back, but when we get to the check before re-entering the baggage hall, we find out that only three of us will be allowed in, so my dad, brother, and I head in.  We get to the belt where our luggage is supposed to be, but aside from a few lonely and old-looking pieces there was nothing there.  We quickly scan the lost luggage areas for bright neon pink tags, but there's nothing.  Our guide goes over to the main lost luggage desk and radios down to the people who handle bags, explaining what we were looking for and had they seen them and if they had could they possibly send them up on carousel 13.  A minute later a row of six black bags with unmistakably neon pink tags show up on carousel 13.  The bags had indeed been routed ahead to Australia.


Airports are pitifully inefficient.

At any rate, we all arrived in Australia together, bags included.  A family friend is staying with us kids while my parents are staying in a hotel about a 20 minute walk away, as my dad has business which will be taking place around the hotel.  We went for a walk just around Sydney for a bit, getting dinner and some fruit on the way back.  I decided to experiment a bit with pictures of other people, so here are the results.

This is the view from our apartment.  It's quite a long ways down.



Longtails!

...and a plant.

This was my first test of how my new lens could handle fast moving objects (i.e. longtails)...and I must say it performed well.  They aren't all back yet (or if they are, there's a lot less of them) and they're staying pretty far off-shore still, so all these were taken at the long end of the lens...and yet all these shots still had to be cropped to have a reasonable bird/sky ratio (obviously excepting the plant).  So for such a small distant object the fact that the lens could lock in on them and get an in-focus shot is pretty promising.

Week 10

The aforementioned missing picture has arrived.  Thus, this.

Week 10 (March 12, 2011)

"Lampshade"

Uncle Glenn

"Azteca"

Aunt Deanne

"Crying in the Rain"

Uncle Dan (sketch)

Alexandra

"Jason"