Sydney is an incredible place. We went to see the city sights yesterday and the first serious question that comes to mind is who built all the wonderful buildings, monuments, roads, infrastructure, drainages, bridges, etc.. when their population is not even 1/4 of ours. There are less than twenty million people in all of Australia and yet, it is such a modern place. Carpenters and construction builders must be making oodles.
Australia is not all cosmopolitan though In fact, there are great swathes of land so huge that if some aliens transfered all the Philippine islands in the middle of Aus, the Aussies wouldn’t even know we were there. Also, the 12 deadliest snakes in the world are found in Australia. Strangely enough, New Zealand has NO snakes!
Our Melbbourne concert last week went VERY WELL. We performed at a new theater called BMW Edge. It’s an all glass building with metal lego-like scaffolds, bars and frames all over. Really postmodern. The world can be seen from inside and vice-versa. It made us feel like being in an aquarium. The concert was preceded by cocktails and that was cool. It was a small venue and we had a full house.
A day after the concert, we rode a bus to Sydney which is a thousand miles a way. On good roads and a great bus, it is so pleasant a ride. The scenery is breathtaking as you pass through endless vistas of pasture, hills, valleys, lakes most of them pristinely untouched.
The past two days, we’ve been traveling along the pacific coast of the New South Wales area and, what can I say! The beaches are beautiful in a wild, fun and potentially dangerous kind of way. The gigantic waves, or hypothermia can do you in. It is remarkable how the Aussies have established a relationship to water. Every Aussie is taught how to swim in school! The whole character building thing revolves around team-working, lifegurading, and stuff like that. They seem to have so mych respect for their environment.
Sorry for abruptly ending right here. Alas, I am only able to write this through the kindness of my host’s internet connection here in Sydney. Mo0re when I return on the 9th!
Love this country!