Untitled-in-sydney

This is the short version as I'm not being a very dedicated writer at the moment.

While Richard was doing family things, Steph, Gillian and I went to the Opera House for one of their official tours. Perhaps understandably, they seem quite set up for guiding tourists around the place and be local standards it wasn't even particularly expensive at around $17 for the 1hr version.

For an extra $150(!) or so you can go backstage into the forbidden zone, and be treated to a breakfast. I don't know about you, but I'd be expecting a pretty monumental plate of snarlers for that and so it was that we opted for the fetch-your-own-breakfast version instead.

We had a brief tour around one of public rooms recently renamed in honour of the architect, sat in and heard a little of the two main performance halls and one of the theatres in he basement (that we've been to performances in, unlike the larger, flasher upstarts in the main complex).

For some inexplicable reason photography is not allowed in the main halls even when there is no performance on-going. I should add that it's inexplicable largely because I didn't ask.

Anyway a diverting way to spend an hour listening to the tales of death-by-committee angst that you might expect from such a large structure (more so than normal it would seem).

There are plans afoot to spend millions of dollars (in the hundreds of) to refurbish the old dame, as it seems that quite a lot of the backstage bits leave something to be desired and cause production companies to have to rethink. Just the next day an article in the paper spotted a "black cloud hanging over the opera house".

Some things do not change.

Then off (hence the shirt) to the Melbourne Cup via, urg, shopping :-(