Iter Facere

Sydney

Friday, July 2o
Sydney, 5:45 PM

We slept late, and got started about 9:00. It was raining, again, so we headed to the Australian Museum first after breakfast. The museum is a natural history of Australia collection. We began with the indigenous peoples exhibit, which concentrated on the more modern aspects of indigenous Australians and their interrelationship with the Europeans, both spiritually and politically. Aborigine refers to the original peoples of the mainland, while indigenous refers both to them and to the people of the Cape Torres Islands, which are a distinct culture. The original indigenous people had a spiritual belief that there was a good and evil component to the Dreamtime, tied closely with the land. Unfortunately, the early European missionaries didn’t catch on to the obvious corollary with Christianity, and that made the interaction of the indigenous and the Europeans even more difficult. I was surprised to find out that the indigenous Australians were in contact with other cultures prior to the settlement of Australia. Indonesian traders made contact with the northwest, and Portuguese and other mariners had limited contact prior to settlement.
After we left the museum we walked over to the Botanical Garden. It is right in the heart of Sydney. The sun came out at an opportune time and we walked to Mrs. MacQuarrie’s Point, which gave us a nice view of the Opera House and the Harbor Bridge.

We walked back toward the Opera House. It’s a nice walk, through a nicely laid out garden with spectacular views of the harbor. It wasn’t too crowded, either, although that might have been because of the recent rain. We spoke with a woman at the information center, who informed us that the exotic flying foxes that we had been so excited about in Cape Tribulation were a nuisance in Sydney, denuding trees of their leaves. Also the ibis is a complete pest, rats with wings.

We had stopped for lunch earlier at a cafe, where I overheard two men from one of our competitors talking about work. I tried to eavesdrop and pick up something juicy, but without the right context I couldn’t learn anything useful.

We found ourselves at the Opera House without a plan. We decided to walk to the Powerhouse Museum, it being around 2:3o. We started on our way, stopped for a drink and bought Jenny a shirt at an overpriced store. Sydney is very pleasant, but walking around Sydney, at least in this area, is no different than any high end shopping area in the U.S., or the world. Hermes, Polo, Prada, blah blah blah. Borders, Starbucks. Nice stuff but I don’t need to spend twenty five hours in transit to see it. The city is very attractive, but both of us are trying hard to figure out what we will do to fill the time the next couple of days.

It took us longer than we thought to walk to the Power Museum, so we’ll save that for tomorrow. Back to the hotel. I found an internet cafe where I could post to the blog. For some reason, I can’t make email send, although I can receive. Hmm. A problem for another day.

posted by Jim @ 9:45 AM