Went across the street to a coffee shop for a late breakfast and to use their Internet hotspot.  Then walked down to the the harbor for a tour of the Opera House.  The Opera House is really two buildings enclosing an opera stage and a concert hall.  The design was in the reject pile when it was found by a architectural judge from America.  The actual construction began in 1973 and took over 10 years and ran 14x over the budget.  Gehry, who later designed the Disney Center in Los Angeles, called the Opera House ‘a building that changed the image of an entire country’.  The interiors are designed for maximum acoustic performance with native wood walls and ceilings.  They are small; 1,500 people for the opera and 2,700 for the concert hall.  Needless to say we have lots of images of the Opera House from any angle you can ask for.

After the tour, we took a ferry to Manly Bay which is at the ocean end of Sydney Harbor.  We had a late lunch and then took the ferry back to Sydney.  We walked toward Sydney Bridge and found a park with upright bears painted for each country.  Each bear is done by a different artist.  Kathy especially liked the ‘Where is Moldavia’ bear and I liked the Iraq bear for its Arabian Nights theme.  We returned to the hotel and took a nap before going to a concert at the Opera House.  The hotel where we are staying has the US Fox News channel.  We see rain in California, tornados in the mid-West and Immigration debate in Washington.  Not much seemed to have changed back home.