Circularity - March 17 (updated March 18)

Here I am trying not to slide out of my chair while I write this. It is one of those office-style chairs with all the knobs and levers underneath, and I can't figure out how to adjust it so I can stay in the chair.

I have fallen behind in my blogging again, so I  really need to write something today, even if I don't like my chair.

1. I am still healthy, and now I am not sharing air with all those coughed and sneezers, so things are looking promising.

2. We had some hotel issues, but everything has been sorted out. We have a fantastic room on the 39th floor, with an awful chair. I can live with that.

3. It rained in the morning so we decided to do something indoors. As we were walking to a museum, I was stopped by two women who asked for directions to an art museum. I don't know why, but wherever I go in the world, people stop me and ask for directions. Do I look like I know my way around more than other people do? Anyway, I actually WAS able to help them. And they were Australians! 

4. We went to a museum called the Hyde Park Barracks. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The Barracks were built by convicts for convicts in 1817-19. In 1848, the Barracks became Sydney's Immigration Depot. In 1887, the building was repurposed for courts and offices. (A landmark legal decision granting women equal pay was issued here in 1973.) The building has been a museum since 1979.

This is an excellent museum. The audio guide included with admission is excellent. The museum is just the right size to see in one to two hours. (I usually find bigger museums overwhelming because I feel obligated to look at everything that is there.) The museum is interactive and especially well-suited for schoolchildren.

Children leaving the museum, dressed in their school uniforms and wearing their mandatory sun hats:

Visitors can wear period clothing and lie down in hammocks just like the convicts did.

One thing that made the museum interesting to me was the focus on the building itself and what it could tell us about Sydney's history. We were able to see different layers on the walls exposed by restoration, various artifacts found under the floorboards, notes left under the wallpaper by painters, and so on.

5. Next we visited The Great Synagogue. For security reasons, photos were not allowed. This is a shame because the inside of the building was unexpected and absolutely spectacular. I would describe it as a combination of Byzantine and Moorish architecture, with a little Gothic thrown in. The ark was beautiful and quite unusual. It had sort of a beehive dome on top of it. (The docent did not know its back-story, which is too bad. I'm sure there is one.) We were shown a video about the history of the synagogue and the history of Jews in Australia. (A small number of the original convicts were Jewish, so they know exactly when the first Jews arrived in Australia.) Then we had a Q and A and saw a very small museum in the basement.

Here are a few photos from outside the entrance:

6. At this point we felt ready to try Sydney's public transport, so we bought Opal Cards at a little newsstand, tapped the cards on the turnstile, entered the subway station, and tried to figure out where to go to get the train we wanted. Once you figure it all out, it is fairly easy. There are screens telling you what platform to go to and when the next train will arrive. The screens also list all the stops, just in case you are tempted to take a train going in the wrong direction. The train cars are modern and clean, and surprisingly, they are double-decker cars. We quickly reached Circular Quay. This was quite a challenge only because the tunnels leading to the subway are FULL of enticing shops, food courts, cafes, and other distractions.

7. Circular Quay is a big train station, but also the name of  the area around it. It is also where cruise ships dock. It's a really busy place. About 3/4 of the busy people there know exactly where they are going and are walking there in a deliberate manner. The rest just got off the cruise ship, or are tourists there to take a ferry and they all have that deer-in-the-headlights look.

8. It was time for lunch, so we looked around and decided on a Vietnamese street food place called Bún Me, where we purchased Banh Mi sandwiches. They turned out to be extremely tasty.

9. From Circular Quay we took a ferry to Manly. It was a gorgeous 30-minute trip. The sun was shining and the views of the harbor were stunning.

10. Manly is a pleasant community with great beaches, and lots of shops, restaurants, and opportunities for outdoor activities. There was a nice information center at the dock and the nice people there gave us a nice map. We found a nice walking path on the map, asked them about it, and decided it would make for a nice walk.

  

11. We walked a few blocks from the harbor side to the ocean side along a busy pedestrian area known as the Corso. On the ocean side we found a beautiful beach.

We followed a path along the coast toward Sydney Harbour National Park.

We eventually came to another beach after passing a number of art installations.

12. Eventually our nice path reached the Sydney Harbour National Park and our pleasant stroll became what Ozzies call a bush walk. Shortly after this I found out that our nice map was NOT a topo map. In fact, it wasn't a particularly good map at all. A heavy red line, almost straight on the map, was in fact a rough trail, with a number of route choices, uphill all the way. There was no signage whatsoever on the trail, and we never knew where we were, or whether we were looping back, heading off into the wilderness, or going where we thought we were supposed to go. I take that back. There were a number of signs about foxes and traps and poison.

It was now quite hot and we felt like we were on one of those Escher staircases where you always go up. Finally we came to a stone wall with a little gate in it. A little gate. You had to bend down to get through it. It had a sign on it that said something like "Gate to North Head."  This wall and gate were not on the map. The sign on the gate made us think we were much closer to North Head than we actually were, and that we had missed our turn back towards civilization. We met a German guy on a bike, and he was even more lost than we were, having no map with him.

While there are no wild animals around here (except, apparently, foxes) there are some big ugly spiders.

Eventually a jogger assured us that we were nearing either a middle path or a metal path, and after that there would be a gun emplacement from WWII, and after that we would come to road to a sewage plant which we should not take, and then there would eventually be another road, and if we followed that road we would eventually come to a bus stop and we could ride the bus back to Manly. (Oh, yeah, and if we hurried we might get back before midnight.)

Long story short, we completed the loop, got back to Manly, never saw the bus, caught the ferry, and returned to our hotel hot, cranky, and dehydrated.