Summer Events in Sydney

Everybody comes out for summertime in Sydney.  Despite this year’s ridiculously wet weather, the parades, festivals, exhibits, and shows have gone on.  Here is a small sampling of what I’ve been up to over these busy few weeks.

Rally for Marriage Equality

Kicking off summer in early December was the Rally for Marriage Equality.  The gays and supporters were out in full force to march through the city and end up at the Labor Party’s National Conference in Darling Harbour.  Australia’s party in power voted to add marriage equality to their party platform, but only with a conscience vote, thus diluting its impact and delaying the inevitable for no good reason.  But, it was a step in the right direction and great to see everyone out.  Overall, it was a good day:

New Year’s Eve

The fireworks on Sydney Harbour are pretty spectacular. Fireworks shoot off of the Harbour Bridge and from several barges strategically placed all up and down the harbour.  If that wasn’t enough, several of the skyscrapers in the city shoot fireworks off their roofs.  Not bad.  And what was even better was our new apartment’s view of it all.  The photo quality isn’t that great at night on the iPhone, but you can totally see the bridge and the opera house:

Chinese New Year

A few weeks after New Year’s was Chinese New Year.  Having a large Asian population, Sydney has a massive Chinese New Year Parade.  Watching the news about it earlier in the week, the parade is actually more pan-Asian than strictly Chinese.  All sorts of groups take part, and news estimates put the crowd at around 100,000.  Not bad.

We watched about 30 minutes of the parade before both my mate and I were ready to go.  There were just too many people out.  And besides:  I’ve been to China now.  I’ve seen the crowds and the giant, ornate dragons first hand.  I don’t need a parade.

Sydney Festival

Most of the month of January is dominated by the Sydney Festival.  The three-week or so long festival consists of arts, live music, and all sorts of other performances.  There’s something on every day and night.  Last year, my mate Todd and I went to a light and sound show at the Chinese Garden near Chinatown.  This year, I decided to check out opening night with a few of my mates.  There were stages set up all over the city with all sorts of different acts.  After walking around the streets of the Sydney CBD, we ended up in The Domain – a big park right next to the city.  The crowd was massive:

Notice the stage on the right side of the photo.  There were too many people for us to stick around too long that night, but we went back to a few days later to the Symphony in the Domain.  It was still packed, but not like sardines.  A picnic, a few friends, and a symphony later, it was a splendid event.  Best part:  it was free!

National Maritime Museum

There are also tons of exhibitions at museums all over Sydney.  The National Maritime Museum had been advertising their Aqua exhibit as “a journey into the world of water.”  From the creators of Cirque du Soleil, I thought the exhibit must be excellent, and it was a great opportunity for me to finally check out the museum which I had been meaning to do for ages.

Well, the journey into the world of water turned out to be a journey into the world of a waste of money.  Short, lame, and hugely uninformative, the exhibit was a let down.  Luckily, the museum had a boat made of beer cans:

That was the highlight of the museum.  The rest of the inside was a snooze-a-palooza (unless you’re old and boring, in which case the museum is awesome!)  The saving graces were the submarine and destroyer on display outside in the harbour.  I’m pretty sure you can get separate admission to just the submarine and the destroyer at a much more reasonable price.  The submarine was a quick walk through for me and Charlotte:

But we ended up on an 80 minute guided tour of the destroyer led by a very ancient naval veteran who took a particular liking to Charlotte because she was from his hometown in England.  It was ok though, because this grandpa-like fellow had tons of war stories and made the tour quite real.  He served on a ship identical to the destroyer we were on, so he was a wealth of information.  A+.  Also, torpedoes.  Torpedoes!  I tried to nab a few as “gifts” for all of those lovely places that I love so much (you know, like Iran, Syria… the Vatican…  Utah… France…)  but they were too hard to sneak off the ship.  Next time.

Oooo – and the museum’s gift shop also had some treasures:

Finding Antarctica

I needed an awesome exhibit to make up for the crappy one about water.  The State Library of New South Wales had an exhibit called Finding Antarctica: Mapping the Last Continent.  It was several rooms full of maps of Antarctica.  The maps started in the 1500’s when people first thought that there might be something down there.  As most of the maps were world maps, they also featured Australia.  It was incredible to see how both Australia and New Zealand slowly appeared on maps, bit by bit, over the course to decades and centuries.  It was crazy!  For an amazingly long period of history, people thought that Australia was connected to New Zealand AND Antarctica… AND Tierra del Fuego – the island shared by Argentina and Chile right off the bottom tip of South America.  Because people back then thought that there must be as much land below the equator as there was above, the massive land mass of Australnewzealarticdelfuego was believed to have existed.  Later on, it was of course discovered that these were all separate and of varying sizes.  Incredible.  As the exhibit was chronological, it also had all sorts of newer information about manned exhibitions to the frozen continent and Australia’s role in exploring the last continent.  Fantastic!

And yes:  I’m a nerd.  $25 for some fucking 2-minute uninformative exhibition on water – which was offensively half in French I might add – is no match for a FREE exhibition showing the history of maps of Antarctica.  FREE!  I’d pay $25 for that one.

Citizen Glen

I took a half-day Friday at work to attend my mate Glen’s citizenship ceremony.  Glen was super excited to become an Australian citizen, and I was super excited to be there to support him.  I was also excited because I wanted to see exactly what a citizenship ceremony entails.  I found out that each ceremony is different, as each city puts on their own ceremonies for their residents.

I had stopped and watched the citizenship ceremony for a few moments at the Australia Day festival at Hyde Park a few weeks ago.  There were probably twenty to thirty people becoming citizens that day, and Sydney’s Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, called out their names individually and told a brief story about their journey to Australia.  Glen hadn’t been asked about his story, and after hearing about it from me, and a bunch of other stories from other people, he really had no idea what to expect… and neither did I.  How exciting!  I met up with Glen and his partner, David, before the ceremony.

As you can see, Glen dressed up for the occasion.  How dapper he looked!  Other new citizens opted to take a less formal, more stereotypical Aussie approach to their dress:

Board shorts to become an Australian citizen:  LOVE IT!  I also loved that Clover Moore did this ceremony as well, as she’s our much-loved mayor AND member of state parliament.

Notice in the picture, there’s a lady in the background by the piano.  She was playing jazz while people got their citizenship, and that was a bit out of place.  But before the ceremony started, she was playing all sorts of Australian classics, such as Waltzing Matilda.  There was also the national anthem, Advance Australia Fair:

The new citizens took either an oath or an affirmation.  The difference, you ask?  The oath mentions god.  The affirmation doesn’t.  I was extremely pleased that Glen chose to do the affirmation.  In fact, the group doing the affirmation was significantly larger than the group doing the oath.  Woohoo!  And after that, it was time to get your citizenship.  Unlike the small ceremony that I saw on Australia Day, this one was a bit too large to tell everyone’s story.  There were over 140 people from over 40 countries, including Glen’s homeland of Ireland, becoming citizens on Friday.  In fact, names weren’t even called – everyone just lined up in order, shook the mayor’s hand, and became Australians.  And of course, I got it all on video:

Notice at the end how Glen was given a goodie bag as he walked off stage?  We had heard lots of different things that people get on their citizenship day.  Someone told Glen that he would get a plant.  He didn’t.  Inside the bag was a small picture book of Sydney, a City of Sydney pen, a voter registration card, a small packet of Vegemite, and a piece of paper outlining how not to die in a rip current.

I’m not joking.

Despite the slightly disappointing contents of the bag, Glen was still all smiles.  And where there was once only one Australian, now there are two:

The city had a small buffet after the ceremony with champagne and some traditional Aussie desserts:  lamingtons, pavlovas, and Anzac biscuits!  I love free food!  And so does Jessica - she came along as well:

After the ceremony, we headed to the Australian Hotel.  Operating since 1824, the Australian Hotel is Sydney’s longest licensed bar and remains stocked full of dozens of types of Australian beer, making it the obvious place to celebrate a new citizenship.  We (I) decided that we needed to have one beer from each of Australia’s six states, starting with a Cascade from Tasmania:

Some Aussie fare to eat:  a crocodile pizza along with a Cooper’s from South Australia!

Four more states and then many beers after that… and then some shots too… we were very… very happy…

And when we’re happy, we talk to strangers.  Like Jess and I tracking down the dude in the black shirt with the skulls on the back.  We saw him at the citizenship ceremony and thought it was just awesome that he was wearing a shirt with skulls on it to get his citizenship.  He was Irish as well and therefore far drunker than we were. 

I’m pretty confident he had no recollection of us the next day.  But that’s ok.  He became an Aussie that day too so he was entitled to drink it up.

Now that I know how these things work, I’m looking forward to attending a few other friends’ ceremonies in the next year or two, and then (hopefully) my own in 2014.  I better start learning all the words to the national anthem.  But until I have them down perfect, I’ll just leave you with this…

Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!  Oi!  Oi!  Oi!

Everything's Great

China may have a Great Wall, but everything in Australia is great!  And not really because I say so, but because everything has “Great” in the name.  Seriously.  Look at a map of Australia sometime and see how many items you can spot with the name “Great” – like the Great Australian Bight, Great Barrier Reef, Great Dividing Range, Great Keppel Island, Great Sandy Desert, Great Victoria Desert… It’s not just natural features either.  Want to take a walk on the Great South West Walk?  How about a drive on the Great Ocean Road?  If that one has too much traffic, check out the Great Alpine Road, Great Central Road, or Great Northern Highway.  Great Otway National Park would be a great place to visit, as would Great Basalt Wall National Park and Great Sandy National Park.  Even the Australian Jews get in on the action.  Right here in Sydney is the Great Synagogue.

So, why is everything so great?  It’s probably because Australia is just so big – so great in size.  Australia is the world’s sixth biggest country by land area.  That means there are some great distances between places on the map.

Let’s put the size into perspective:  2 of Australia’s 8 states and territories are larger than Alaska.  Larger than Alaska!  A further 3 states and territories are larger than Texas!  Everything’s bigger in Texas, eh?  I think not.  Take that, you full-of-yourself Texans!  The smallest mainland state – Victoria – would still be the 11^th largest state if it were in the US.  For the island states, Tasmania is 4 times larger than Hawaii, and the Australian Capital Territory is nearly 15 times the size of the District of Columbia.

On a greater scale, the state of Western Australia would be the world’s 10th largest country by land area if it were to become independent.  Crazy!  Queensland wouldn’t be far behind at number 18, and the Northern Territory would round out the top 20.  South Australia and New South Wales would both be ranked in the 30’s.

On the other hand, despite having the world’s sixth largest land area, Australia is only ranked 52nd in population.  That’s a lot of land for not a lot of people.  California has more people than the whole of Australia.  So does Texas.  New York and Florida aren’t far behind.  Australia’s most populous state, New South Wales, would only be ranked 13th in the US and has approximately as many people as Washington state.  And as for those smaller island states and capitals:  Hawaii has nearly three times the population of Tasmania despite Tasmania quadrupling Hawaii’s area, and the District of Columbia has nearly twice the population of the ACT despite it being only one-fifteenth the size.

Looking at the world again, Western Australia would be ranked 143rd in the world in terms of population if it was its own country.  143rd!  That’s a remarkably low population for a country that would be the world’s 10th largest.  It would be the world’s least densely populated country with under 1 person per square kilometer.  Currently, Mongolia is the world’s least densely populated country, and its figure is nearly equal to the population density of South Australia.  The world’s second least densely populated country is Namibia, and its density is nearly equal to that of Queensland.  Northern Territory, with a population density of 0.2 persons per square kilometer, is less than 25% as dense as Western Australia.  No independent country has as few people in such a space.  In fact, the only places on the planet less dense than the Northern Territory are Greenland and Antarctica.

So what’s the point of all of this?  Well, it’s this:  Australia has a lot of land which makes distances between places really great.  But when you also factor in the sparse population and all of that vacant land in the middle, the country’s size just seems so much greater than it actually is.

So maybe that’s why everything here is “Great”.

Or maybe it was just an incredible marketing scheme that started shortly after the first convict settlers landed in Sydney.   A 200+ year old tourism campaign is a pretty good success.

National Parks

My friend Jenny’s mom once told me that she’d like to visit all of the national parks in the United States.  A big task that would be as the United States has 58 national parks scattered far from Maine to Hawaii, Alaska to Florida, and even American Samoa and the US Virgin Islands.  That’s a lot of driving and flying – or swimming or walking for the insane.

If you’re up for a slightly bigger challenge, you can try visiting all of Australia’s national parks.  And by “slightly bigger challenge”, I really mean “hahahaha you’ll never do it!”

Australia has a whopping 582 national parks.  582!  That covers roughly 4% of Australia’s area.  When you add on the other roughly 1,750 protected areas in Australia, it turns out to be around 10% of the continent.  Not bad.

Now, to be fair, the US has massive state park systems – over 6,600 strong – along with a handful of national forests and such.  That more than makes up for the lower number of national parks.  But still.  582 is damn whopping.

Living in the US for 27 years of my life, I ended up visiting… five national parks.  Just five.  That’s sad.  Looking back, my first was Shenandoah NP in Virginia on a road trip with my friend Jenny summer after freshman year of college.  I was 19.  The next two were Mt Rainier NP and Olympic NP – both done while I was living in Seattle.  And the last two – Grand Canyon NP and Petrified Forest NP – were done on my cross-country drive from Seattle back to Florida.  I crammed in those two right before I moved to Australia.  I’ve been to 30-something states, but apparently I’ve been slacking on the national parks.

I’ve made up for it a bit in Australia.  In Western Australia, I hit up Torndirrup NP, William Bay NP, and Gloucester NP with Cade and Karen.  I popped into Naracoorte Caves NP in South Australia along with Port Campbell NP and Great Otway NP in Victoria while on my big Adelaide to Melbourne road trip with Liz last year.  Kei and I saw Watarrka NP and Uluru-Kata Tjuta NP when we went to the Northern Territory last July.  And I’ve made the rounds in the Sydney vicinity:  Blue Mountains NP, Royal NP, Seven Mile Beach NP, Kamay Botany Bay NP, Ku-ring-gai Chase NP, and Sydney Harbour NP.

While on our South Coast road trip earlier this month, Oscar and I checked another one off my list:  Booderee National Park.

Booderee NP takes up nearly all 26 square miles of the Jervis Bay Territory (pronounced Jarvis Bay by Australians in the same way that derby is pronounced darby and clerkship is pronounced clarkship… wtf?).  The Jervis Bay Territory is a small piece of land at the bottom of Jervis Bay on NSW’s South Coast, but it is not part of New South Wales.  It was ceded by NSW to the Commonwealth (federal) government back in 1915 so that Canberra (Australia’s inland capital) would have access to the sea.  Jervis Bay was sort of a part of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) until 1989 when the ACT achieved home rule.  Jervis Bay was then transferred back to the Commonwealth government.  Today, in addition to the national park, the area consists of a military base and a small Aboriginal village.

Ok, enough of the history lesson.  Booderee NP was stunning.  Our first stop was Green Patch beach:

Look at that sand!  It is said to be the whitest sand in Australia.

The water in Jervis Bay was incredibly clear.  No major seaweed issues, no big waves, no pesky birds, and no fish swimming around my feet.  The water was frigid, but everything else lined up so I went in for a long dip anyway.  It took me a while to thaw out.

On the other side of the park, the view out to Wreck Bay was fantastic.  The water was slightly warmer (but still frigid) and the waves were bigger.

The middle of the park featured botanical gardens and a short hike around Lake McKenzie.

We were told by the visitor centre to check out the lighthouse at the far east end of the park, looking over the Tasman Sea.

The lighthouse was actually lighthouse ruins.  The sign said they built the lighthouse in the wrong place and it actually caused a bunch of shipwrecks.

FAIL.

Finally, back to the Jervis Bay side of the park to take a late afternoon nap at Murrays Beach.  While the lighthouse lacked in excitement, watching the park ranger who got his truck stuck in the sand as the tide came in totally made up for it.  Evil, I know.  But so entertaining.

So, if you kept count, Booderee brings my grand total to 15 national parks visited in Australia.  Only 567 more to go!

Crap.

Small Town Australia & Noodle Deceit

Small town Australia… is a place I could never live.

Seriously.  I’d be bored out of my mind.

Weekday evenings in the cities are a bit disappointing – with shops closing right as you get out of work (except for Thursdays when the malls are open late).  But restaurants are open as are plenty of other activities.  Small cities are pretty bad.  In Wollongong – Australia’s 9^th largest city – one Sunday afternoon in 2010, a mate and I quickly realized that our only late lunch (3pm) option was fast food.  Restaurants closed between the lunch and dinner shifts.  But in small towns, the restaurants shutter their doors after lunch and they don’t reopen for dinner.  I’ve had encounters with small town Australia before, but the trip to the South Coast really brought to life just how boring small towns really are.  The small towns along the Great Ocean Road in Victoria didn’t bother me.  They are touristy, and things were open in the evening because of the large number of visitors.  But South Coast NSW is a far different area.  While it is a popular weekend getaway for Sydneysiders, the region doesn’t have the international recognition that the Great Ocean Road has, or even recognition by people from other parts of Australia.  Going during the week, when all of Sydney is at work, proved a bit challenging when it came to finding dinner.

First stop:  Berry!  A cute little town consisting of one main road, it had all of the essentials that make small towns great – mainly sweets.  Because a road trip isn’t a road trip unless you stop in a small town and get some fudge, right?

Berry is also famous for their doughnuts.  Hell yeah!

Lunchtime in Berry was nice – we walked up and down the road until we found a café that suited our appetites.  For a small town, it seemed like we had endless options, so we decided to venture back in for dinner as our hotel wasn’t really near any other towns.  We parked and proceeded to walk up and down the street.  The bustling little tourist town that we had encountered only hours ago had become…

A ghost town.

Only three things in the entire town were open:  one little grocery store and the two pubs (because you can’t deprive an Aussie of beer).  So, pub grub it was.  We picked the cheaper of the two options – they had a Tuesday schnitzel special – and placed our order.  Good thing we ordered when we did.  When our little buzzer went off and it was time to pick up our food from the kitchen, the register already had a sign up that the kitchen was now closed.

Had we been ten minutes later, we surely would have starved!

Ok, we wouldn’t have starved, but we would have had to eat granola bars from the local grocery store, and that in no way, shape, or form is a proper dinner.

The next night we drove through a town called Nowra.  It is a relatively big town with an urban area population of 32,000 – much larger than Berry.  Not bad for a place that most people have never heard of.  We picked Nowra on purpose as we knew there would be nothing in Berry, and we assumed that all of the other small towns would be shut as well.  With 32,000 people, surely there must be a few dining options.  So, we drove into the town centre, parked, and walked around.  From what we could tell, we had four options.  Only four.  Just four.  And two of them weren’t even really options.

1.  Subway

2.  Pizza Hut

3.  A Chinese restaurant

4.  Another Chinese restaurant literally next door to the first one

When in Rome… we opted for one of the local Chinese restaurants.  The sign said that it was founded in the early 1950’s by the first Chinese immigrant to the region.  Having been around for so long, we assumed it must be somewhat good.  All of the employees inside were white though.  That was a bit strange.

Oscar and I both ordered chow mein.  What we got was:  a bunch of steamed stuff in a bland, gooey sauce tossed over some of those thin little crunchy noodles that they put in Chinese chicken salads in the US.  Seriously?  They weren’t long, hot, tasty noodles.  They were those little crunchy bits you can buy in a bag in the supermarket.  Ugh!

I took a closer look at the menu.  With the history of the restaurant, there was also a little note about the hosts.  The hosts’ last name:  Ng.  Ng.  Would you like to buy a vowel?

Ng is not a Chinese last name.  It’s Vietnamese.  People from Vietnam own the Chinese restaurant.

I’m angry.  And hungry.

Are small towns in America this bad?  I honestly can’t really remember the last time I’ve been to a small town in the evening in the US.  I tend to stay away as they usually have too many rednecks and religious nutbags.

Though, I should probably give a point to Australia.  I suppose I’ll take shitty imposter Chinese “noodles” over religious crazies any day of the week.

South Coast NSW

Oscar was back and we hit the road for a three day road trip!  New South Wales – the state that Sydney is in – has a massive stretch of coastline.  Despite the sizable distance, the coastal stretch south of Sydney extending all the way to the border with the state of Victoria is called the South Coast.  As that is a roughly seven hour drive, the region is by no means small.  We set out to see the area, though given our time constraints we only made it about three hours down to a place called Jervis Bay.  That area was absolutely marvelous and is deserving of its own post to follow.  But first, I present some other highlights of South Coast NSW!

We started Day 1 at the Illawarra Fly Tree Top Walk!  Australia is home to four of these tree top walks, and Illawarra Fly is the third one I’ve checked off the list.  I still reckon that the first one I did in Western Australia was the best, but this one definitely had the best view:

The lake is Lake Illawarra and just beyond that is the city of Wollongong – Australia’s ninth largest city.

The Illawarra Fly is built on the Illawarra Escarpment – the remnants of an old mountain range.  Because it’s built on the side of a mountain, it was really easy to get high up.  When they say tree top, they mean it.

It was here that Oscar and I took the first of many “self-portraits” over the course of our trip.

Now, at this point, I’ve seen kangaroos in the wild.  I’ve seen emus in the wild.  I’ve even seen koalas in the wild down along the Great Ocean Road.  And from the looks of it, I thought I might be lucky to catch a glimpse of a wombat!

Unfortunately, we didn’t see any, even though we waited by the designated wombat crossing.

Next stop:  more views at Saddleback Mountain.  The steep drive up – which almost put our rental Corolla to an early grave – was well worth it:

Later on, we checked into our hotel:  the historic Coolangatta Estate!

Built by convicts in the 1800’s, the site has been restored and now operates as a resort and winery.  Their 2003 Semillon was delicious and we bought half of a case.  We bunked in “The Cottage”.

Nearby was the famous Seven Mile Beach.  Stretching from the town of Gerroa in the north to the mouth of the Shoalhaven River in the south, the beach – as its name suggest – is one of the longest in New South Wales.  Indeed it was long – and more importantly – it was empty.  There was nobody to the left!

And nobody to the right!

And nobody right behind me!

The beach was ours!  All seven miles of it!

On Day 3 we drove back to Sydney along the Grand Pacific Drive.  Now, we didn’t actually know it was the Grand Pacific Drive until near the very end when we bumped into this sign as a lookout point and realized that it was the exact drive – from end to end – that we just did.

The Grand Pacific Drive is NSW’s answer to the Great Ocean Road down in Victoria – except it’s not nearly as well-known… or as fabulous.  Which is probably why I had never heard of it.  That being said, there were some pretty spectacular things along the way.  In addition to Seven Mile Beach National Park, we passed through the town of Kiama with its pretty lighthouse.

More famous, however, is the Kiama Blowhole!

Ok, so it doesn’t look like much… until water comes out of it:

I need to remember to not hold the camera vertically when taking videos.  Sorry.

The geology behind it is quite interesting… if you’re a nerd!

Lucky for me, I’m a complete nerd.  Do you have a problem with that?

The drive also takes you through Wollongong:

And we pulled over so that Oscar could play on the historic waterfront canons.

Planking.

Oh lord.  Trip’s over!