Sydney, day 3

Curt went running this morning but I stayed in bed. I'm the lazy bum of the family. Still, we were out the door by 8:30 which is pretty good for us. There's a Lindt Chocolate store/cafe on the corner that I had my heart set on, but they didn't open until 10. What is wrong with those people??? Don't they know there's a chocoholic in town who needs her chocolate pronto? So we end up at Starbucks for the mandatory crappuccino ( a word Austin invented 10-15 years ago and is always pronounced with a high pitched parrot-like squawk "CCRRAAPuccino") for Curt while I pig out on a muffin. Then we're off to sketch the opera house. OK, I'm using the word "we" loosely. Curt will sketch while I will sit/read/etc.

While we walk, he tells me of his adventure this morning: running through the trendy/seedy neighbourhood called Kings Cross (like Capitol Hill?) and seeing a prostitute (male? female?) dressed in full gear (pink lingerie) after a presumably busy night. Hmmm.

He's found a shady bench with a great view of the opera house and gets right to work. Annoyingly, there's a little red tourist train that passes by every 15 minutes, and we get to hear the same spiel over and over "... and the design for the opera house was inspired by orange peels ..." After a couple of hours, Curt's masterpiece is finished, and the tops of his sandal-clad feet are beginning to turn red. It must be time to stop.

After a quick lunch at a sandwich kiosk (and the obligatory ice cream bar), we take an official tour of the opera house. Curt is in his element here. He gets to hear all about how many roof tiles there are, how many tonnes of reinforced concrete were used, and he especially likes the pre-cast, post-tension ribs. Don't ask.
He also seems quite taken with the story of the Danish architect, who quit halfway through the project after too many cost overruns and 14 years of delays. Apparently he refused to compromise on quality so he left. And he has never returned to see the Opera House completed! Forty years later, it appears the Australian government is attempting to patch up relations with Mr. Utzon (who is still alive), and in response his son travelled to Sydney to help with some modernisation plans. Curt admires the way Utzon stuck to his principles, and never sold out.

After the tour, we walk to the Sydney Harbour Bridge and climb another 200 steps (we already went up 200 steps in the opera house tour) to the top of the pylon for the view from the overlook. Naturally, this jaunt includes lots of information about how the bridge was built, how much steel was used, how long it took ... Look at the size of those girders! He loves this stuff.

As we head back to the hotel, we notice a crowd sitting on the grass in a park, watching a giant screen TV. You'll never guess what's on. Cricket. It's a competition between the Aussies and the Poms (English) and people are riveted to the games all week. Each game lasts 3-4 days, and there's 5 games. I swear I've been trying really hard to understand the game of cricket but it's just baffling if you ask me. I love the way they break for tea halfway through the match, though. The cricket games are broadcast on screens all over the city, and the scores are constantly updated on the ticker-tape style news display in downtown Sydney, just like the one in Times Square in New York City. But every time we passed the news ticker here, all the news was about sports: which boat was winning the yacht race (Wild Oats?), which boat had broken its mast again (New Zealand's), how badly the Aussies were beating the Poms (absolutely annihilating them), and the retirement of one of the Aussie cricket stars (bad boy Shane Warne). There really wasn't any "hard" news to report, which is actually rather comforting. One day they added a line about Gerald Ford's death, but then the news returned to yacht racing and cricket. As it should.