Day 308: Australia Day

I've been lucky enough to experience quite a few national holidays, and Australia Day in Sydney promised to be another good one. The weather was still holding up, so I took the bus over to Bondi Beach to spend the morning / early afternoon at the beach. The combination of sun and holiday meant that it was quite busy, with dozens of surfers, and thousands of swimmers. Thousands of swimmers probably sounds like an exaggeration, but it's not. There was some weird world record attempt going on for the longest chain of thongs (As a point of clarification, thongs in Australia would be what North Americans call flip-flops. Keeping track of Australian words of things is only slightly less challenging than learning a new language entirely). They were achieving this by having thousands of large foam thongs that people rushed with into the water, trying to link arms. The process was a bit slow because the waves are substantial and would keep knocking entire rows of people over, but it was entertaining to watch and probably fun to participate in.

From the beach I followed the walking path they have hugging along the coast going south. The walk took me past a few more beaches and eventually to Coogee. From Coogee I cut back inland for a pretty lengthy walk back to Bondi Junction to catch the metro back.

Back at the hostel I met up with some of the others and we decided to go out to Darling Harbor in the evening for the fireworks show. Prior to the fireworks starting they had some tall ships looping through and the most painfully dull event announcer ever running the show. The closest I can think of is a very slow-speaking Mr. Rogers with an Australian accent, repeating things over and over slower and slower because things were taking longer than expected and he refused to let there be quiet. Finally the fireworks started, and it was actually a pretty entertaining show. The two things that made it better than the fireworks I usually see (Canada Day in Toronto, for example) were that it was combined with a harbor laser show a bit like the one in Hong Kong, and that the fireworks were synchronized to music. I found the music actually made it a lot more interesting.

It was quite the crush getting away from the harbor afterwards, but luckily we only had a short walk back and after spending almost an hour slowly working our way out of the crowd the rest of the trip back was easy.