We arrived in Sydney on Thursday night, to the home of a couple who have been on two exchanges, one to Colorado, the other to Calgary, and who billet current exchange families in Australia when needed. They have a lovely house west of the city centre and close to the Parramatta River, which becomes Sydney Harbour closer to the downtown. On Friday morning we took the ferry from their place to Circular Quay, in downtown Sydney. It was a Rivercat, or a catamaran ferry, full of tourists, business people and students heading to school - just another ordinary day for them, going by water to where they need to be for the day.
My (Susan's) parents had arrived in Sydney on the previous Tuesday, so John headed off to his teachers' conference and I met my parents at their hotel in the CBD. Very neat meeting up with one's parents halfway 'round the world! We spent the day around the city, firstly having coffee in the Queen Victoria Building, which is just beautiful:
We went to Australia's Biggest Yarn Store (you would have loved it, Wendy!) as my mother is working on an Australian themed tapestry of a couple of Eastern Lorikeets and needed some supplies. We hit Dymocks, a nice big bookstore, where we had to tear the girls away from the Harry Potter displays (they even had one of the movies showing). We went to the Strand Arcade, another great example of Victorian architecture - mosaic floors, intricate ironwork, and woodwork. It makes me wonder that if Australia has such great examples of this in its major cities, did a place like Toronto ever have such arcades? Our histories are so similar, I think we probably did, but they were bulldozed for more modern structures. It's a shame, really, because they are so beautiful.
Anyway, we walked through Hyde Park and to the Australian Museum. I often think that museums in major cities are all pretty much the same, but I am pleasantly surprised each time I visit one that they are not. This was no exception. The first room we came to was a skeleton room (yippee!). It was fantastic, full of complete skeletons of all sorts of animals, including a whale right in the centre, and southern hemisphere animals, which are unfamiliar to me. There was also a human skeleton on the skeleton of a rearing horse, and a vignette of a human skeleton sitting in a easy chair with a book on its lap under a Tiffany-style lamp, a dog skeleton, complete with leash, was sitting next to the chair, a bird skeleton was in a cage, and a cat skeleton was chasing a mouse skeleton into a hole in the skirting board. Here are the pictures:
There was a mineral exhibit, and an exhibit of Australian birds and insects - I now know what the Sydney funnel-web spider (deadly) looks like, in case I encounter one (small chance). There was a great interactive children's area, and to finish off some exhibits of the Aboriginies, including history and art.
We walked through the Botanical Gardens on our way back to Circular Quay, where we met John and the rest of the teachers for a nice dinner at Rossini's, overlooking the quay.
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