Wellington Journal

06 June 2009

Dug & Katie Visit Sydney

[NOTE: Sorry to interrupt our North Island Trip, but I wanted to get this in before I forgot the details. I’ll get back to the North Island soon.]

Not too long ago, I sent out a plea to everyone whose email address I could dig up in regards to a contest I’d entered. I didn’t win, but the whole effort was worthwhile if only because it gave me an excuse to get back in touch with people I’d not been in touch with for years, if not decades. One of those people was my old college roomie, and life-long pal, Scott Shepherd.

Scott is a professional actor in New York – one who actually makes a living at it. This is no mean feat, as you can imagine, and I’ve always been impressed. I’ve also been jealous, seeing as how Scott gets to go to hip places around the world (L.A., Ireland, Moscow, and um, Brooklyn) to visit, perform, and be paid for it. So I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised when he wrote me in response to my blast email to tell me he was touring Australia. But to discover he’d be in Sydney (which is just a short hop across the Tasman from Wellington) and performing the critically acclaimed Gatz at the world-famous Sydney Opera House… well, that was something I simply couldn’t miss. And it seemed like the kind of theater experience I couldn’t let Katie miss either. And so, against the better judgment of my financial advisor (hi, Sara!), but with the blessing of my understanding spouse (hello again, Sara!), Katie and I flew to Sydney last weekend to see Gatz and discover the city. I am so glad we did.

Hyde Park from our hotel

After a very comfortable Saturday afternoon flight on Qantas (free wine! chocolate ice cream bar for dessert!), and an inordinately long time waiting for our ride to the hotel, we checked into our centrally-located, but extremely small, hotel room and watched an episode or two of Firefly. The next morning we strolled down to Darling Harbour and happened upon a pancake restaurant, which is never a bad thing. We had until the mid-afternoon for the play, so we also managed to take the monorail, check out a little of the central city, and even head up to The Rocks for the weekend-only outdoor market there.

Sydney’s Darling Harbour

Queen Victoria Building: a high-end shopping mall

Glass blowing at The Rocks outdoor market

The most memorable part of the morning, however, was when we stopped to watch Bendy Em, a Sydney street performer and contortionist. For reasons unknown, I was selected from the gathered crowd as her assistant. She was an amusing performer (and yes, very flexible) and I’m game for anything, so we had a good time. Not quite as good as Katie, though, who I don’t think stopped laughing once during the entire performance.

Dug picks up a Sydney woman

Bendy Em crawls into her 17” box

For any normal tourist, this could easily have been the highlight of the trip, or at least the day. But we had tickets waiting for us at the Opera House, not to mention several hours of theater to look forward to!

This would probably be a good time to explain Gatz. Unfortunately, that’s not easy to do. If I tell you that it’s a verbatim reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, in its entirety, you’d probably think it was exhausting, which it’s not. If I tell you that the cast is just a handful of actors and it takes place in a dingy modern-day office, you might think it’s one of those “modern retellings” of a classic, which it’s also not. I think the best way to describe it is to tell you that I spent six-plus hours listening to Scott read the Great Gatsby, and in the end, I wanted to go out and buy the book so that I could read it again. Truly something I won’t forget.

Katie & Dug in front of the Sydney Opera House

Katie presents… Gatz!

The Opera House at night

The play was Sunday, and we weren’t leaving until Tuesday afternoon (that’s how the flights worked out most cheaply), so we got to hang with Scott on Monday and then do a little exploring on Tuesday. Considering the late night Sunday and time difference (it felt like two hours later than it was), Katie & I were surprisingly hardy for our day with Scott. We took the ferry out to Manly Beach and spent the afternoon figuring out how many “Manly” puns could be made before the joke became tired (more than you’d think). After we got back, Scott led us through the Botanic Gardens where we saw wild parrots and cockatoos flying around, as well as hundreds, very possibly thousands, of bats. Yes, bats. Just hanging out in the trees. Hard to be scared of them, really, it was so overwhelming odd.

After the gardens we wandered through a few of the more (ahem) interesting parts of the city. (Bringing Katie concerned me until I realized that it was only a few years before she’d probably be wandering with friends and a backpack through similar sections of Amsterdam or Berlin or somewhere. Oh, well.) Our destination was a famous boomerang shop Scott had heard of, and it was worth the trip. The proprietor told all about how he started the International Boomerang Championships after getting some Yank from NYC interested in the 70s. “Oi, those Yanks beat us that year, and I told my mates of course they did! They started drinking after the championship!”

Scott & I both bought a boomerang, and then we went to Hyde Park to try them out. It occurred to me, though, that throwing a hard stick that’s intended to come spinning fast back at you in the near-total darkness wasn’t the brightest of ideas. We’d probably either lose the boomerang or end up winning a Darwin award. So we only did it twice. (Scott & I have obviously made a lot of progress since college.)

Scott & Katie, with the Harbour Bridge behind them

Manly Beach

Exotic birds are the norm in the Sydney Botanic Gardens

Those are bats, people. Bats.

St. James Cathedral that evening

Our lack of sleep caught up with us on Tuesday. We spent the morning at the Sydney Aquarium, seeing sharks, colorful fish, and two of the only captive dugongs in the world. These are the manatee relatives who were supposed to look like mermaids to sailors of yore. All I can say is, if they were fantasizing about these creatures, then they’d been at sea for a very long time.

The aquarium was an excellent one, and I particularly enjoyed the underwater viewing tunnels, which they had in both the shark pool and the dugong pool. The tunnels were clear and the pools not overly large, so you really felt like you were in the water with the various sea creatures. At one point both Katie and I were watching one of the dugongs pass overhead, when we got to see something I honestly never thought I’d see: we saw a dugong poop. No, I didn’t get a picture. Let’s just say it’s not anything you need to put on your bucket list and leave it at that.

We also visited the National Maritime Museum and learned a little about immigrants to Australia from the 40s and 50s, and we visited the Australian National Museum to see a whole bunch of skeletons and the largest known extinct marsupial. But like I said, we were pretty tired, so we spent a good portion of the day just enjoying the sunshine (that was supposed to be rain) and our books. Later in the afternoon we headed back to the airport and then to Wellington, which was much, much colder. But we’d missed Sara & Megan & Alison and were very glad to be back.

Katie and a ~~mermaid~~ dugong at the Sydney Aquarium