Sydney pics, part 1 of n

It's 0600 local time. I woke up around 0300. Moral: it's too warm for the duvet, and maybe I need some melatonin. As promised, pics of Sydney from yesterday and the day before, in more or less chronological order.



King Street, Newtown, a couple of blocks from where I'm staying.



The aforementioned bus stop posters, King St. & Enmore Rd. I gotta love how somebody, presumably trans, made neatly printed stickers and got every last one of those posters.

Let's put the street art together:





A little Aboriginal theme going there.



I think this piece is an allegory about gentrification, which judging from the stickers is a concern in the neighborhood. Yeah, I'm a contributor, dammit. Poo.



I may have mentioned that Australia's referendum on same-sex marriage recently passed. There are many, many signs in favor of it all over Newtown. This is probably the largest I've seen.



Gotta love the painted shadow.



Home away from home. I can't get over the wrought iron.



A few doors up the street.



Crazy vegetation, a few doors in the other direction.



This is one of several Aboriginal flags, painted or flying, that I saw. I had to get arty with the palm tree & the steeple. The wall behind it encloses...



...Camperdown Cemetery, because the Goths raised me right. It's a little neglected for extra spookiness. Even the newest graves I saw are from the 1920s. Some headstones had illegible verse, but even better was the info on how people died: a teenage boy drowned in Sydney Harbor, a sailor on a navy ship, etc.



The biggest damn magnolia I've ever laid eyes on, just inside the cemetery entrance.



Eucalyptus where it belongs - in Australia, not California - in the park surrounding the cemetery.



Sydney is so sunny that they have to put shade cloth over kids' play areas in parks. I'd never seen that before.



And finally, yours truly at Bondi Beach! Remember when iMacs came out, and one of their colors was Bondi Blue? The water really is a rare and beautiful electric, slightly greenish blue. I didn't walk on that sand, though, and let me tell you why.

Burner buddy V took several tries to convince me not to go into the water at the beach: the wind had blown in lots of seaweed, which probably also meant lots of men-of-war jelllyfish, or as locals call them, bluebottles. As a Florida girl I knew those are bad news. There were also gulls feeding nearby, which probably meant sharks nearby as well. V is a nurse and told me all about how big the bite mark was that she'd seen from a shark attack the other day. Sharks get within 20m of shore pretty regularly.

So what did we do instead? Sunbathe topless on big, flat rocks at a women-only area - popular with Muslim ladies, despite the boobs - and frolicking in the saltwater pool. Superbly relaxing, especially if you're a nurse who's seen multiple patients die in the last day or so. V had to warn me about the sea urchins that like to hang out at the edges of such pools; the one I was in was basically a natural tide pool with some extra walls added. Oh, and as we left, V made sure to put her sneakers on before she walked on the grass because of some damn plant that'll pierce your foot otherwise. Aussies are used to it and maybe even a touch defensive about it, but this place really is out to get all humans.

Came back to the apartment. Had OK dinner at the sliding-scale vegan place, Lentil As Anything. Walked up & down King St. Tried the vegan gelato that V recommended (Gelato Blue) and was surprised to find that it kicked butt. (The Tickler, who can't do dairy, has been informed.) Managed to stay awake past 2100 hours.

Sydney pics, part 2 of n

I'm posting pics so I can keep my self awake until a reasonable hour. I felt compelled to decline an invitation to a fetish party from V's partner, because a) I've been awake since 0300, and b) I've got some weird dry cough, dammit. I have some serious party plans for the weekend, so I better take care of myself now. I did administer beef pho and vegan gelato for dinner.

But on to the pics! I did the touristy bits today, taking the train from Newtown to Circular Quay*, wherein lies a ferry terminal, with the famous opera house just to the east and the Harbor Bridge a little further to the west. So in slightly non-chronological order:





I wish my photography did the Sydney Opera House justice. Yes, it was way over budget and behind schedule, but you know what? The people who commissioned it got their money's worth and then some. It's decades ahead of its time, reminding me of things Gehry did in this century using CAD software.

Right next to the opera house is the Royal Botanic Garden, which greeted me with a big group of Japanese school kids and this gonzo sign:



Yup, lots of different kinds of plant sex happening. The RBG (love the abbreviation, no?) brought out the biology geek in me. For instance:



An Australian white ibis, the sight of which made me freak out and take many pics. You see, I'd seen an ibis in person exactly once in the fifty years prior to this, near Deland, Florida when I was in my twenties. And then I saw maybe a dozen more of them at various points around Circular Quay, poking those curved bills into the ground.



A particularly majestic specimen of the hoop pine, which you'll be unsurprised to hear isn't a true pine. It's a native Australian member of Araucaria, a genus of coniferous trees that I had up to then believed was limited to South America. Uncle Wiki says its distribution was nearly global during the Mesozoic, but most of the ones in the northern hemisphere disappeared with the dinosaurs. It's possible that the planks in the old apartment that I'm sitting in are hoop pine.



I'm told locals call it the coat hanger. I went looking for the place to climb onto the bridge. It took me quite a bit of walking, and by the time I realized you have to pay for it, my dogs were barking good and loud.

On the way to the Harbor Bridge I saw several groups of cheerleaders in uniform, all getting photographed. They all had Australian accents. Several emotions clashed silently in my head.

I kept my appointment at Gallery Serpentine's secret lair; they no longer have their regular store on Enmore Rd. The secret lair is in an unmarked warehouse full of theater-related businesses. When I walked in the door there was a gruesomely realistic fake disemboweled cow greeting me to the left of the door, made by a prop company. Somebody had positioned a beer bottle at its mouth. I have that photo, but I thought I'd spare you.

I didn't take photos of the secret lair because it's - wait for it - a secret lair. However, suffice it to say that it's a garden of Goth delights. I... bought things. I bought an entire outfit. It's awfully reminiscent to me of things cupcake_goth would wear, only in my colors and not hers, with a longer silhouette. And I can wear it to work, so I don't feel as if I did something too terribly impractical. And the lady who helped me? My age and cute!

Oh yeah: more street art.





*It isn't quite circular anymore, but it was during the second half of the 19th century.