Good Day Mates:

Today started off with a tour around Sydney. Every other corner is a hotel and every second corner is a coffee shop. As we made our way through the city, we stopped first at Bondi Beach. Bondi Beach is one of the most iconic beaches in Australia. Regardless of the weather, which ours was, there is swimming, kids playing, a lot of surfing and people just milling about.

Bondi Beach is also home to the Icebergs club. It is the only licensed winter swimming club in the world. It started in 1929 with some local life guards who wanted to stay fit during the winter. One has to be accepted in (there is currently a 5 year wait) where you have to be available to swim every weekend for 11 months of the year in an iceberg ocean pool.

We then headed down to the harbour and into the Royal Botanic Gardens. There we learned that Lady Macquarie, the wife of the first governor, had a bench carved out of sandstone rock on the peninsula in Sydney Harbour. She used convicts in 1810 to carve the rock so she could sit there and sketch boats coming in to the harbour.

Our final stop with our tour was at the amazing Sydney Opera House. It is as fantastic as you think it is and it lives up to everything you heard. A surprise to me was that it opened in 1973. I for sure thought it had been around much longer. It sits on Bennelong Point and the inside has been renovated several times since its opening.

It was originally designed by a guy named Utzon and he and his team began building it. In the late 60s with a government change, there was a dispute over funding and because he was not getting paid, he left the project. It was later finished by a guy named Peter Hall who tried to keep Utzon’s vision as best as he could, with some changes.

Sadly, Utzon did not accept the invitation to come to the opening and it was not for many years that he came back to Australia and saw what he created and assisted them with future plans.

There are over a million tiles on the roof of the Opera Hall and although it looks white in pictures and in the distance, it is actually white and matte cream due to the reflection of the sun. The tiles are hand checked, tile by tile, every 5 years. And never cleaned other than with the rain.

We then had the good fortune of going inside to see 2 of 6 concert halls. The first was the Joan Sutherland Theater and it holds 1500 guests. Everyday, they construct the stage and after each performance, they take it down, even though they are having the same show, day after day. The reason was that ballet dancers are very finicky on their rehearsals and they want to do them on the stage they will be performing on so it is cleared and reconstructed each day.

When there is an Opera, no mics are necessary because the acoustics are so great that they dont need any. The ceiling is in the shape of a shell or the shape of the top of your mouth, with bumps and all. Every seat is the same and the sound reflects the same.

The next one was the concert hall. This holds 2700 guests and is for Symphony only. Prices range from 200.00 in the back to 450.00 in the front. There are some seats behind the Symphony and people think they are bad seats but they are not so most dont buy them. Turns out they are only 50.00 and you can hear from them as good as any other seat. The walls are made with wavy lines in them for sound and the ceiling has large pink looking leaves that reflect sound. There is also the biggest and best Pipe Organ in the concert hall and is rarely used, despite being tuned once a month.

As a group, we then lunched at the Opera House Cafe and the Michigan 6 went on to do a Sydney Harbour tour. Very interesting despite the rain all day.

Our finale was our own progressive dinner. We first walked to find an underground pub. We barely did find it but we did. It was in a dark basement but the drinks and appetizers were delicious.

Next stop was a tapas Mediterranean style restaurant called Mercado. We shared a bunch of stuff and made our way back to our hotel.

It truly was an amazing, fabulous day down under.

Cici at Sea signing off……