Sydney, Day 2

We started off our second day in Sydney by visiting the aquarium. In addition to a variety of fish, there were fantastic glass tunnels underneath the water of two large tanks. One held the dugongs, the other had sharks.

Dugongs are very similar to manatees, with one main difference being their tail shapes. Manatees' tails are round and paddle-shaped while dugongs have fluked tails similar to whales.

After the aquarium we walked along the Harbor Bridge for a view of the city. The bridge was first proposed in 1815 by a convict-architect. No action was taken and more people continued to make proposals until the bridge was finally under construction in 1924. The bridge was completed in 1932. During construction, over 100 buildings had been demolished. While this initially seemed unfortunate, the rebuilding of destroyed buildings provided work for many residents in the Depression.

As we made our way to the Royal Botanic Gardens, I stopped to listen to a man playing didgeridoo on the footpath by Circular Quay. He had a techno-esque beat on CD and was playing didgeridoo over it.

We walked into the Royal Botanic Gardens and were both excited to see the sign that read:

Please walk on the grass. We also invite you to smell the roses, hug the trees, talk to the birds, sit on the benches and picnic on the lawns.

My feet were sore so I took full advantage of the cool, plush lawns. It felt like walking on a pillow while icing your feet.

Annoyingly, the pyramid glass house had closed for the evening; though, there was also an entrance fee that I don't think I would have been willing to pay had it been open. There was more than enough to see in the rest of the gardens.

A Day with Flat Isabella

A friend recently e-mailed me about one of her students who is taking part in a 50 states class project modeled after Flat Stanley. They were going to start the project in November, but this student has Juvenile Myelomonocytic Leukemia so my friend sent out e-mails to try and get responses quickly.
Instead of printing out the photograph of Isabella, I drew her myself so that she could be more comfortable. It is, after all, not quite the right weather outside for the long sleeved shirt and pants she was wearing. Hopefully she likes the new outfit.

We hopped on the tram and spent Saturday wandering around around town to see the sights.

Once we got into the CBD, we went to Federation Square. There just so happened to be an Indonesian festival going on when we got there. Performers had been flown in from various islands in Indonesia to dance and play music. We sat and watched for a while under the warm sun. There were intricately designed costumes and plenty of beautiful dances.



Just across the street was Flinders Street station. It's a train station and one of the landmarks for Melbourne--seemed like another good place to show Isabella.

Then we crossed the bridge over the Yarra River. There's a ferris wheel in a park along the river, but we didn't have a chance to go for a ride. We did, however, take a brief trip to the Queen Victoria Gardens and smell some roses.

We finished off the day with a visit to the Melbourne Theatre Company. It was the last day of the International Arts Festival and there was a play I really wanted to see. Thankfully, she didn't mind coming along. We took a picture outside the theater with my sister and Stephanie who are both visiting from Seattle. Then I hid Isabella in my bag and snuck her in so she didn't have to pay for a ticket. There certainly are benefits to this method of traveling...

We saw the Apocalypse Bear Trilogy. It wasn't the most appropriate choice for a 2nd grader, so Isabella stayed in my bag. I loved the play with all of its oddities and eeriness.

Throughout the play there was plenty of humor and even a song sung in a school cafeteria. The three sections all involved the bear showing up, doing things such as preparing after school snacks and offering to pick up groceries, but then the bear would burst into a fit of his violent personality. We never saw him kill anyone, but he spoke of death in gory details. Overall, a very strange but intriguing play.

Bach Organ

For almost 16 consecutive hours on Sunday, musician Calvin Bowman played the entirety of Bach's organ works at the Melbourne Town Hall.

This was yet another part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival. Though, Bowman resides in the state of Victoria, so I don't believe internationalism is necessarily a criterion.

He started playing at 8am and continued on through to 12:40am. There were only several short breaks scheduled during this feat for rest and meals.

Color-changing lights lit the 32-foot organ at Town Hall in all of its splendor. At times it glowed red, then shifted to a light blue or green. There is only so long my interest can remain piqued by one man with his back to the audience, and the shifting hues of the room made for additional observations. Some parts of the organ were only very visible in certain colors so each change was an opportunity to see more.

I attended just part of the performance for "Major preludes, toccatas and fugues II."
Take a listen, if you'd like. The video itself is unexciting for its entire duration, if at all, so I did not bother to make the dimensions large.

After the session of organ amazement, I went to the airport to pick up my sister. In addition to the long flight from Honolulu, she'd spent two days of her Hawaiian vacation in the hospital with inflamed intestines and was feeling ill. So we came home, she settled into the house and got some much needed rest.

Arts Festival Events

Fringe ended on Sunday. The Melbourne International Arts Festival started Friday. For three days, the city was buzzing with both opening and closing weekend art shows.

Sunday evening I went to events at both. First was the International Arts Festival's bell-related trilogy. They had organized cathedrals and other buildings in the CBD to ring their bells in song at 7pm. I was too far from the activity to hear, but others' accounts made it seem no different than the usual chimes.

The Federation Bells are computerized to play songs on their own several times each day, but for the weekend Strange Fruit, a performance group, climbed onto poles and manually played the bells at sunset. As it grew darker, silhouettes of swaying figures against the sunset became lit from a golden glow underneath. Men and women clad in bright red swayed in all directions to ring different bells, even bending almost upside-down to reach the lowest ones.

The first couple songs were similar and a little too slow to remain interesting through the end of the second composition. Drums were brought in for the third, which had a quicker pace and I felt better blended the various pitches into one work.

After the show at Federation Bells, my friends and I headed out for a quick meal and then to Alexandra Gardens for a performance by Transe Expresse. The group wove medieval theater, circus and music to create "Ringing the Bells." It started by performers running with torches through the audience to platforms spread around the garden. From the platforms, the performers yelled in French accents at the surrounding viewers. After several minutes of this, they would run off to replace a performer on one of the other platforms. The costumes were stunning, yet peculiar, and gave off a creepy medieval aura.
Below photo by Xhanatos














All of the performers then rushed to their instruments on the center stage, which was then raised into the air far above the audience. They stood on hoops and small platforms, playing music from the sky as the structure spun like a mobile. During the show, the tent-like structure appeared to bloom, raising and opening the petals that held each of the musicians. All the while, three women did tricks on trapezes and ropes suspended in the center.

My final venture of the evening was a show at Bar Open in Fitzroy. The concept of "Guitar Relay" interested me: fifteen guitars were set up for musicians to use in improvising a song. The idea was that one person would start playing, a second would join in, then a third, and so on. If you initiated this with a group of people who know each other well and have practiced, I imagine it could be good. This was not.

Six or seven men sat on the floor of the bar with guitars resting sideways on their laps. One stood, playing his electric guitar with a violin bow. The others struck one or two chords at a time, letting the reverb carry the sound and fizzle out before playing more. Behind the men was a projection of astral images overlapped by the bar scene being recorded and modified on the spot by a man moving the camcorder from side to side on a tripod. Every few minutes one of the players would start playing a riff that was actually enjoyable, but it never lasted long and the screeching noises would take over. I tried to stay for a while to see if guitarists would change or the music would start sounding like music, but after 40 minutes little had changed besides the room beginning to empty.