lego: architecture - sydney

I've quite enjoyed seeing the various "skyline" sets from Lego Architecture... I'm not completely sure which one they started with, but I remember seeing Venice and thinking "I've climbed across all of those things in Assassin's Creed". And London, with the big London Eye is gorgeous... but as soon as I saw they'd announced the Sydney set, I had to get it...

It's not the first Architecture set with a Sydney theme I've put together... all the way back in 2012 I got the Sydney Opera House set from the actual Sydney Opera House.

So on Sunday afternoon I got to work putting it together...

First came the unpacking. Once again, there's the big thick instruction book that seems to be a hallmark of the Architecture sets, half of which had information about Sydney, the other half was the building instructions. Then there were four bags of pieces, from the quite big down to the very tiny.

I spend a good long while knolling out the piece.. unsurprisingly there's a lot of black, a lot of dark blue and a lot of both tan and white pieces, including the little pyramid pieces that make up the opera house which I hadn't seen before.

My favourite pieces, or rather my favourite colour in this set has to be the transparent blue pieces up in the middle top of the knolling image... they're just so bright and really great looking.

We start with the base of the model... first the black base with the printed Sydney tile, then the grey jumper tiles... and the much paler blue of Sydney Harbour... along with the white sailboats.

I kind of which they'd put a lighter colour under the water tiles since they're transparent. Either just plain old blue or some other colour that matches the transparent tiles.

The tiny touches of green around the base of the bridge is also quite interesting.

The Sydney Harbour Bridge... It's an interesting construction technique, especially the way the interlocking pieces are combined. And it's perhaps a little more "generic bridge" looking, although once the columns go in, it looks fairly accurate.

Next up comes Deutsche Bank Place... or the Ski Jump Building as I think somebody told me it was colloquial called (I could be wrong). I actually had a lot of fun building this, mostly because it's not overly complicated and repeats, but the end result looks pretty damn spiffy.

I think maybe they could have left the top layer of blue and white off, but it is accurate to the three stepped in sections of the real building.

For a part of the build that doesn't really have a ton of parts, the Sydney Tower is probably the most dead on and the most interesting to build. The transparent blue bricks I liked so much combine with the dark blue bricks to make the bottom section and then the rest of rocket engines and satellite dishes.

I do like that the top of the tower is just a bunch of stacked satellite dishes... and it works really well.

And last but not least, the Sydney Opera House.

To be honest, it felt very familiar after the previous Architecture set, but this was like the micro version of that, which in itself felt very stylised. It's much the same mechanics though, all the sails are held in place with hinge bricks.

It does look pretty damn fancy once it's finished though, and I couldn't resist some "beauty shots" on some blue card.

I will say that it's a taller set than I was expecting, due mostly to the Sydney Tower, but then that is very Sydney.

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fortieth birthday sydney trip

Deciding to spend my 40th Birthday with a trip to Sydney and tickets to see The Lion King was definitely the right way to celebrate the quadruple anniversary of my birth.

It has, however, taken me two and a half days to clean up my blog posts and turn the 1414 images I took over the five days into the 129 shots accompanying these blog posts and the 382 that will be finding their way onto the blog in weeks to come.

Interestingly putting the fact of being able to check out hot guys at the beach, most of the shots at Manly and a lot of the early morning Bondi shots are amongst my favourites from this trip. There's definitely a knack to shooting surfers... either when they're locked in contemplation staring out to see or knowing whether or not they're about to try and ride a particular wave...

And getting that shot when they do ride a wave (like the shot in the top left corner of this post) is magical.

I think next time we go to Sydney we may have to explore even further afield... with the exception of the first day, we got outside of the CBD (even it was just across the harbour) every day, which was fun... but we definitely need to come up with at least a rough itinerary too.

Although winging it has it's moments too...

• Day One: The Arrival with shopping
• Day Two: Newtown, Birthdayness and The Lion King
• Day Three: The other side of the bridge
• Day Four: Bondi
• Day Five: Manly and The Departure

Thanks for having us again Sydney, and thanks for such a great birthday!

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fortieth birthday sydney trip - day five

Five days ends up feeling a little bit like a long time for a holiday, especially if you're walking everywhere every day and you don't really have any concrete plans in place beyond a couple of things. At least it does for me. And usually we would have already been home by the time I'm typing this, but there wasn't a flight at the right time in the morning, and then we were booked to leave at 1:30pm but Qantas in its infinite wisdom decided to cancel that plane and book us on one that didn't leave until 3pm.

Which actually ended up being a fairly okay thing.

I totally crashed out early last night... I think I gave up not too long after 9:15 which is essentially unheard off for me unless I'm sick. But a lot of early mornings and late nights and a hell of a lot of walking around had done me in, so I just crawled into bed and called it a night.

That also meant that I woke up at around 5:30 or so, but at least I had a chance to generally lie in and not have to rush into the day, so that was nice.

We hadn't come up with anything resembling a plan last night, not even where we were going for breakfast... only that we needed to check out of the hotel before 10am and be on the train to the airport by 2pm at the absolute latest.

Given the fact that we've done the fancy breakfast thing every morning to some degree or other, when I rolled into Ma's room just before 7:30 I suggested that we just go down the street to McDonalds, grab something cheap and cheerful and go and eat by the harbour. Yes, there were a billion and a half other places that we could have stopped off and grabbed something, but I was semi-craving a Sausage and Egg McMuffin... plus it's what we did on the last morning of our last trip.

The only thing we shouldn't have done was gotten coffee there... especially given the general quality of the coffee we've had this trip, McDonalds coffee just doesn't make the grade.

However given that our view while eating our breakfast was the sun-drenched Harbour right in front of the MCA, with the sun sparkling on the water, the Opera House in the background and the general hustle and bustle of Sydney on a Monday morning, who cares if the coffee was crap. Not I!

After breakfast we wandered along in front of the Overseas Passenger Terminal so that I could take some photos of the Opera House (oh, and we found another rhino which wasn't there all weekend, bringing the total of rhinos found to nine for the whole trip)... unfortunately the photos didn't turn out anywhere near as well as the one I snapped on my iPhone... but there were some interesting shots.

As we wandered back towards Circular Quay we brainstormed ideas of what the hell to do with the rest of our day... and one idea was to take a ferry out to Manly and unofficially test my theory from yesterday that Manly is better than Bondi. We'd already floated the idea of taking a trip on the Fast Ferry to Manly on our next trip, but I figured that it would be more expensive than the regular ferry since you know, faster equals more expensive. But it's actually cheaper... so why the hell wouldn't people take the faster option (maybe because it's not part of the official transport network and doesn't work with existing tickets).

And it was only about 8:40, so we had plenty of time to head out to Manly, have a wander and some lunch and be back in time to head to the airport. So we went back to the hotel to check out and stick our bags in storage, and then wandered back to Circular Quay to buy tickets. Unfortunately, we'd missed the 9:20 ferry, so we had to wait for the 10:10 one.

The only downside that I can see to the Fast Ferry is that you can't sit outside at the front of the boat, which is always my favourite spot to be... but that's okay, we sat outside at the back, facing backwards and just pretended that we were experiencing the trip in reverse.

It was a perfect day for it... warm, but not overly hot and not a cloud in the sky!

I did notice that my camera was down to one bar of battery while we were on the ferry though, so I knew it probably wouldn't last the whole trip to Manly. But it's done pretty well... four and a half days and I never had to recharge it.

When we got to Manly, we headed up The Corso to the beach.

We didn't go all that far... just wandered down the beach front for a while and then Ma found a spot to sit in the shade while I photographer the surfers... and any other attractive gentlemen that happened to be within focal range.

Because Ma was safely ensconced, I actually went down on the sand to see if I could get better or at least some different shots. Plus it's the first time that I've actually set foot on sand during all our trips to Sydney, so that was something different. I also managed to take a shot of Spaceman Syd on the beach... the poor boy hadn't seen much air in the latter half of the trip...

It always seems like a good idea to photograph a Lego minifigure in and around the place, but I always feel like it’s better in concept than reality most of the time... especially given the often temperamental tap focus on the iPhone 5s. And the fact that when you're shooting in bright sunlight it’s nearly impossible to see what you're shooting until after you've taken the shot. I have a lot of unused photos of either a totally out of focus minifig or a rogue hand or half a head or something.

I also ended up with a wet butt from sitting on the sand to photograph Syd... I'd tried crouching down but couldn't get low enough to see what I was doing, so resorted to sitting on the sand... which was wetter than I thought it was... hence wet butt.

Eventually I'd had my fill of trying to photograph surfers... which is harder than you'd think (the photographing part, not having my fill of it), so I wandered back to Ma's spot and we strolled back up the beach to the surf club. I don't know if there was a Contiki tour group down at Manly... or a day trip from the young offenders unit maybe, but there seemed to be several large groups of late teenaged boys down at the beach, which was strange given that it was a Monday... but if it was for example an overseas high school tour group, then I feel weird for perving on them.

We headed back to The Corso and got some fish and chips from one of the cafes, took it back down to the beach and found a spot on one of the benches. It actually wasn't too bad... the fish was really nice and while I've had better chips, they were tasty. And thoroughly appropriate to the setting.

Once we'd finished eating we snagged a spot on one of the benches facing the beach and sat enjoying the view and snapping photos until my camera ran out of juice (which actually didn't take all that long). So that seemed as good a point as any for the Universe to tell us that it was time to go. We meandered back down The Corso and happened to get back to the Fast Ferry jetty just as the boat was approaching Manly. Perfect timing.

When we got on board there were two seagulls on the front section of the boar who looked like they were either looking in the window or admiring their own reflections in the glass... I suddenly had an image of them as two seagull comedians, doing seagull stand-up for all the other gulls. I'm guessing it would mostly be jokes about fish and scabbing scraps from humans though.

Anyway, we enjoyed the ride back to Sydney from the air-conditioned comfort of the inside of the ferry... a very civilised way to travel.

After we docked, we hiked back up the hill to George Street for the last time and collected our bags from the hotel before turning around and wheeling them all the way back down the hill to the train station. Our timing was clearly spot on all afternoon, because we headed up to the platform after buying our tickets and there was already a train in the station... I wasn't sure which train it was until I heard the pleasant voice over lady say "stopping domestic terminal", so we hopped on-board.

In all things timing is important, but never more so than with travelling.

We trundled out of the depths of Moria with little bother, and then Ma was selected for that random drug/explosive swab thing... because, yeah, my mother looks so like an international drug cartel mule/terrorist cell leader. She just thinks it was because she forgot to take her hat off before going through the security gate.

Because we hadn't had to wait for a train, we did make it to the airport with about forty minutes to spare, so after a quick detour to Krispy Kreme for a little something sweet, we just sat there tapping away on our respective netbooks, writing our respective recollections of the trip.

The flight back was fine (not counting the old woman sitting next to Ma who couldn't seem to sit still), I finished up one of the podcasts I was listening to on the way over, then couldn’t settle to another one so I switched to music and finished typing up my notes in the most awkward position possible given the available space.

Once we touched down it didn't take too long to get our bags (I saw them rounding one of the turns as we got to the carousel so I pushed my way through the mass of people with a string of "excuse me's") and then wandered out to the long term parking area while it was spitting with rain. Of course it stopped just as we got to the car, but after the humidity of Sydney it was nice to come back to the cool of Adelaide, even with the rain.

And I think taking Ma's car to airport parking is going to have to be a thing now... while I'm not sure it's actually cheaper than taking taxis, it was certainly nicer to be able to just get in Ma's little red car and relax rather than having to deal with a taxi driver once we got home.

Once we got back to Ma's place, I unpacked my suitcase and we went out to grab some dinner so that Ma wasn't trying to drive home in the rush hour traffic.

As usual with Sydney, it's more about the experiences we have than the travel loot... but I did come back with a couple of nice things, especially the Scar lion mask from The Lion King. Oh and I did slip back into Kinokuniya for another Game of Thrones vinyl toy... but got Rob Stark... so gave up at that point.

It is definitely nice to be home... now all I have to do is edit the 1414 photos I took and catch up the 60 emails and 700 RSS posts...

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fortieth birthday sydney trip - day four

Today was a fairly early start... couple that with the fact that I got more than my usual dose of sunlight, plus I haven't had a lot of water to drink today and the fact that I've been lying down for a little while and I'm kind of muddleheaded at present.

Hopefully I can manage to string a reasonable sentence together...

Like I said, today was an early start... as I mentioned yesterday, we've been starting our days later on this trip mostly because of me, so I wanted to remedy that, especially since we were going down to Bondi, and it was supposed to be fairly warm, so the earlier the better really. We managed to get out of the hotel by about 7:30 or so and headed down to Circular Quay to catch the bus down to Bondi just before 8.

Other than the stretch along Oxford Street, it's not the most exciting of trips. I was thinking along the way that for a major tourist attraction, the only real way to get there isn't all that glamorous. However Oxford Street had a few moments of amusement, like the fact that there were still The Gays emerging from The Exchange Hotel at 8am and loitering on the footpath... go home homosexuals, you're drunk and its morning.

Anyway, when we got to Bondi we headed down to the beach and wandered along the path along the beach (does that have an actual name?) so I could enjoy perving on hot beach boys with the aid of my telephoto lens.

When we got there there was a weird mist or spray or something happening at both ends of the beach... it made for some interesting light (and some very interesting photos, although what's weird is that the photos that are misty straight from the camera end up looking perfect with a little auto contrast).

About half way down the beach there was a little dog making all manner of noise, not barking, just whining... his master must have been off in the surf and the little dog was fretting about it and had gotten his lead all tangled in the fence. I went over to try and help him untangle himself, but all he did was lick my hand and then sit on my shoe. Stupid blonde dog. He did stop whining though, at least until I headed on down the path... and managed to untangle his own lead.

At the other end of the beach we saw all the little pink singlet clad Nippers having some sort of awards presentation (graduation maybe?) for a bit before heading up to Porch and Parlour for breakfast. It was another place that someone from the social medias had been to not that long ago and I thought it sounded interesting. Turns out lots of other people also thought it was interesting because it's only a little store with limited space and there were a lot of people there.

We ended up having to wait outside for a bit, but it gave us a chance of peruse the menu and decide what we wanted so when a couple of seats freed up at the counter, we slotted in there.

I'm a little ambivalent about the whole experience to be honest... the food was nice, but not amazing... the staff's attitude varied from cute and perky to inexpressive and off-putting. It was a vegetarian place (there were eggs, so that means it can't be vegan, right... or they were ovo-vegans or something, I don't know) so no bacon... instead I chose the brown rice porridge with poached pear which sounded interesting and Ma had the toasted museli and we washed that down with a couple of berry juices.

My porridge wasn't so much like porridge as it was essentially runny rice pudding... which I don't have a problem with, but it was neither thick enough or hot enough. The pear was nice though, as was the juice.

After breakfast we wandered back along the foreshore to the other end, and then wandered along Campbell Parade looking for the Bondi Markets. Only really because we were there and it was Sunday, because we weren't all that impressed with them last time. This time, even more so... but it did fill up some time.

Even so, by the time it was like 10:30am it felt like it was about 3pm. I don't know if that was because of the quality of then light or the fact that we'd been up and out so early, or what, but it was weird.

After the markets we had a poke around the Aquabumps gallery for a while... not with the intention of buying anything, just because, and then jumped back on the bus and came back to the CBD.

All that and it was only noon when we got back.

I have to say that although beaches and I really don't go together (at least not in summer... winter is a whole other matter)... we really don't have anything in common... I don't like them, they don't like me, etc... but even given all that I have a weirdly symbiotic (or maybe parasitic) relationship with them because that's where guys go to wear very often the minimum legally required clothing and parade around. And that I do like, quite a lot.

But I think, having now seen both Bondi and Manly... I feel like I prefer Manly. Partly because Manly is an easier beach to take photos at since it's a lot narrower than Bondi and partly because the way of getting there is so much nicer. Also, Manly actually has some shade along the beach, which Bondi is sadly lacking.

Given that my breakfast hadn't been overly filling or fulfilling, we decided to go and grab some lunch once we were back into the city... although between us getting off the bus and making a quick detour into Customs House for a bathroom break the weather went from hideously sunny to grey and raining in the space of about five minutes.

So we wanted somewhere not too far away, where we could sit and rest our weary feet, and eat good food.

We settled on Jamie's Italian... we'd been talking about trying to go there for an early dinner tonight, but it seemed more sensible to have a big lunch and then a smaller dinner.

And I do approve of whoever designed the waiters outfits for Jamie's Italian... and whoever is in charge of employing their waitstaff generally... not only are they knowledgeable (and the American girl who served us was lovely), but the boys are very handsome... and with jeans and an apron that leaves a triangle of space at the back plus a big chunky leather belt/pouch with some featured buckle action... plus the white shirts... it's a pleasant look.

In some ways it wasn't quite as good as last time... I think last time all the waiting and the lines and feeling very exclusive made for a heightened dining experience... plus I think I made better food choices last time. This time around we didn't want big enormous meals, so I settled on the burger and Ma had the prosciutto, pear and pecorino salad. I've said it before, and I really should listen to myself... as a general food item, burgers should be off my radar 99.9% of the time. And it's not that the burger was bad, it just felt a little under-seasoned... or lacking in some sort of flavour profile. The polenta chips are very nice though.

But whatever deficit there may have been in the main course was more than made up for by the Tutti Fruitti Lemon Meringue Pie. Seriously, that's not so much a pie as it is a religious experience. And I've never eaten anything more slowly in my life. YUM!

When we were finished lunch it was only around 1:30 but we both needed a rest and to take out shoes off... plus at that stage it was still raining, so we came back to the hotel for a while.

A couple of hours and some journaling on both our parts later and I wandered down to Ma's room to try and nut out something of a plan for the rest of the afternoon. And if there is one thing that Ma and I suck at, it's coming up with a plan without any general guidelines. The only thing we were sure of was that we wanted to avoid as much of the St Patrick's Day blarney going on around the city as possible. Oh and to not do a hell of a lot of walking. One of these we accomplished better than the other.

In the end all we really came up with was having a wander before heading back up to Wagamama for dinner. Neither of us wanted anything overly heavy for dinner and the chicken ramen at Wagamama had been calling my name seductively since Friday night.

We started our wander with the Opera House... however for some reason every tourist in the city (well anyone who wasn't in Hyde Park getting their Irish on) was down by the harbour taking photos. We took a stroll around the Opera House forecourt, which was reasonably deserted (I swear some tourists never get further than the Opera House steps given their behaviour today).

After we'd circled around the Grand Dame's skirt we found a spot out on the forecourt to sit and soak up the atmosphere.

And by soak up the atmosphere I mean be in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time while a quartet of Asian girls played every possible version of smartphone photography... selfies, you take me on your phone, now take me on my phone, then get one of these guys who seem to be with us but aren't invited to be in any of the photos to take one of all of us... then in twos and threes and always with the pause between so everyone in the photo can check they weren't blinking and their hair is okay.

All it really needed was narration by David Attenborough... it was perhaps not entertaining, but nicely diverting.

Eventually we’d had enough of people watching and decided to head up to Wagamama the long way, via the Botanical Gardens.

Yeah, it seems like completely the wrong direction, and maybe it was, but it let us wander through the Gardens, even though the light was fading, and it was a much gentler incline than going straight up the hill. It did however mean a lot more walking... of course so did going all the way up to Wagamama at The Galeries.

Once we left the Gardens by the State Library exit we wandered up the hill, giving Hyde Park if not necessarily a wide berth, then at the least an appropriate one before we got to Wagamama.

The place was a lot less crowded than Friday night, unsurprisingly, and we had a whole big table to ourselves for most of the meal before we were joined by some real live Irish folks from the St Patrick's celebrations... which was good if only because I got to hear hot Irish boys talking Irishly at each other.

As far as dinner went, it was a much simpler meal compared with Friday... just a plate of edamame and two bowls of chicken ramen. Man I love their chicken ramen!

Then, once we were done, we wandered, very slowly, back to the hotel, very full of soup.

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