Tourist Frenzy

I didn’t know what to get Adam for his birthday this year and so after talking to some friends and doing some internet searching I ordered him a “See Sydney and Beyond” visitor card. The two day card covers the entry fee for many of Sydney’s sights and also includes a lot of great discounts. The theory behind getting Adam this card was that with it he could learn all about his new home. But did Adam use the card, no. He waited until I got here, and bought another card so that we could go on a whirlwind tour of Sydney together. While the card sounds like a great gift, in order to maximize its value you really need to carefully plan each day and then not be concerned about having to haul ass. Thanks to Adam’s wonderful planning we were able to ring this card dry.

Day one of “See Sydney” began with a lovely free glass of juice and cup of coffee before heading off on an informative tour of the Sydney Opera House. On the tour we got to see each of the 5 performance halls and while we were there we saw a stage being set and instruments being tuned. From the opera house we went up the road to the Justice and Police Museum, and that was really interesting, they have this special exhibit about photography used at crime scenes at the turn of the century. At this point we took a brief break for lunch before moving on to the Museum of Sydney, which if I am being honest wasn’t very good. Rather boring in fact and surprisingly lacked much detail regarding the establishment of Sydney and mainly focused on exhibits about present day Sydney or the evolution of Sydney during the 19th century.

From the Museum of Sydney we walked over to the Hyde Park Barracks Museum, which was okay. I think they could have presented the history of the barracks – from convict colony to state offices – in a more engaging way. Perhaps a tour of the barracks would have been better. Since Hyde Park isn’t far from the Domain, we left the barracks and went to the Art Gallery of New South Wales to see the temporary exhibit about Pissarro (“The First Impressionist”) which was an incredible exhibit, extremely comprehensive.

By now we were pretty exhausted, so we hopped on to a very relaxing, hour-long cruise around Sydney harbor. The boat docked at Darling Harbour where we got off for dinner before continuing our tour. Once revived from the claming cruise and gastronomically satisfied, we headed to the Sydney Aquarium. What an awesome collection of sea life. We ended our day at the Sydney Tower for a fantastic view of the city. We crawled home around 9:30pm and couldn’t move from all that running around.

Day two of “See Sydney” started took off at a much slower pace. Our first stop was the Chinese Garden of Friendship for a quiet and reflective stroll. The garden brought back memories of the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco, but this park was far and away more grand and provided lots of places to stop and enjoy the surroundings. From the garden we moved on the Powerhouse Museum. Wow! What an amazing place. This museum covers so many topics and has so many great exhibits we were quite overwhelmed. Since we couldn’t get to see it all and had to pack it in after a couple of hours (possibly also due to museum fatigue by this point of the weekend) I suspect we’ll be going back.

After day one’s insane tourist overload we opted to go easy on day two and so from the Powerhouse we walked to Circular Quay (pronounced – key) and got on another harbor cruise, only this one was two hours and covered more the of the harbor. The commentary was actually rather good, especially because the prerecorded narrator didn’t talk the entire time. Once the cruise ended we had time for only one more sight. From the Quay we moved on to The Rocks and the Susannah Place Museum, which was fantastic and very reminiscent of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

By the end of the weekend we had definitely seen Sydney.