Sydney!

Ohmigosh!!! I'm in Sydney! Christine and I saved the crowning jewel in the Australian crown for the end of our trip. (Well, end of my trip anyway; Christine is continuing on to Perth after I desert her to fly back to New York on May 3.) Here I am catching my very first glimpse of the Sydney Opera House, which even more visually stunning in person than in all the photos you see of it before you arrive.


Frankly, everything about this city is visually stunning, as perhaps you can tell from some of the following photos. I think Sydney benefits from one of the most beautiful natural settings for any city in the world, perhaps second only to Rio de Janeiro...


Like the lemmings we are, Christine and I arrived and made a beeline for the Opera House, the #1 tourist destination in the city. We took an awesome tour of this architectural wonder (which sorta made me feel guilty, since I spent the last 3 years living a stone's throw from Lincoln Center, walking past it every day, and stopped in perhaps once in that whole time--but really, there's no comparison, right??).



The Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House's largest and most impressive venue. Its acoustics are amazing, it seats 2,676 and that organ in the back goes another 27 feet or so in the wall behind it -- that's a huge organ!




View of part of the Sydney Opera House from another part of the Sydney Opera House.




View of the Sydney Harbour Bridge from inside the Sydney Opera House (the bridge isn't actually rippling apart -- I took this photo through thick panes of glass...)



Sydney Opera House Veranda



Another view of the Sydney Harbour Bridge



View of Circular Quay and Sydney Cove from Sydney Opera House



Christine in the gorgeous Victorian-era Strand Arcade, opened in 1892 :-)




Christine and me in the lobby of the 4 Seasons Hotel. We're not staying here, but Patty and Stacy did. And we wanted to feel close to them. And we needed to tinkle.


Nighttime view of the Sydney Opera House



Nighttime view of the Sydney skyline



Nighttime view of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. (If you look really closely under the bridge towards the right, you can see Sydney's Luna Park on the opposite shore.)



On Thursday night, Christine and I caught a drag show by Varla Jean Merman at the most intimate (i.e., smallest) of the Sydney Opera House's 5 performance spaces. It was fabulously bawdy -- I loved it, and was really excited to see Varla Jean again after only having seen her once before (in Provinctown with Miguel, back in 2001). Be sure to catch this show if you love hearing popular songs rewritten with new lyrics about various parts of the human anatomy!