The Sights of Sydney -- Hop On, Hop Off -- day 1

We decided the best way to begin our exploration of Sydney was to get a two-day ticket for the “Hop On Hop Off” bus tour and use that as our means of getting around the city, so we hopped on and away we went.

First stop, Sydney Opera House where we had a 10:00 am tour.  The place truly is amazing.  There are six performance halls within the building.  The two largest are for the Sydney Symphony and the Opera Hall.  Both were beautiful.  The paneling in the ceiling of the Symphony Hall is made from birch wood – all from one tree, but granted it’s only a veneer placed on top of plywood and the structural materials.  The surfaces in the hall are all wood to absorb sound, and ceiling notches and angles are also meant for sound deflection as are the round acoustical rings which deflect sound back to the orchestra so they can hear each other play.

Symphony Hall

Notice the sound-deflecting circular rings hanging from the ceiling.  

They can be lowered to be quite close to the orchestra.  There are 300 visible pipes for the pipe organ, but there are 10,000 hidden behind the wall, some a small as your little finger and others as wide as a tree and as high as the building.  There are only about 30 people in the world who can play it, and they have concerts about 5 times a year.

 

We must have been there on "House" cleaning day.

Or perhaps they clean a section every day.

The tiles on the outside are two colors of off-white.  White would have been too glaring in the sun.  The one million tiles have to be checked every six years to assure they aren’t loose anywhere, and there is an extra supply of around 300,000 tiles in the basement to assure they never run out if some break.  The place is as stunning in person (well, moreso) as it is in pictures.  They clean the windows every six months.

Hmmm. We considered attending this performance just because of the intriguing sign.

We hopped back on our bus and cruised around much of the area in downtown Sydney.  We got off to wander around the Sydney Fish Market.  Lots of good-looking fish, some weird-looking fish, and lots of Chinese apparently in the city for the Lunar Festival. We were the only white people amongst a mass of Asians.  We had a great lunch at a Chinese Fish Restaurant, and for the most part had no idea what we were eating or how much it was going to cost.  One of the dishes sounded like “fish toes,” but turned out to be fish tofu.  It was okay, but not the tastiest dish on the table.  It turned out to cost about $40 per couple – quite inexpensive, and we loved the whole experience.

We hopped back on our bus and saw more of the city before we hopped off again to do a walking tour of the “spine” of downtown:  pedestrian streets, fabulous buildings (Queen Victoria Building and the Strand were especially spectacular), inside and out, and we even did a little shopping inside some of those fabulous, old buildings.

We hopped on again and got off close to our apartment.  We decided to have a martini before we went home to finish our leftovers from last night.  We also finished off a couple of bottles of wine and talked through growing up, family members, religion, life, and death – we covered it all!