19.June-21.June_What would you do with your first weekend?

What would I do with my first weekend in Sydney? I'm glad you asked.

Friday, we met as a whole group after having some real sleep. We walked down the street to Sydney University where we will be studying for the duration that we're in Sydney. It's about a ten minute walk instead of the hour of trains and buses to get to University of New South Wales where we originally intended to study. I'll take it.

We met in the Architecture building (apparently it's a law that all architecture buildings in the world must be pretty ugly and only som

ewhat functional). So I felt right at home, just like Cincinnati's architecture building. We caught our first fleeting glimpse of the studio space we'd be working in and then went to see some presentations that second year students had put together for Ms. Anna Rubbo's class.  

After such a strenuous morning, I think it's lunch time right? Yea I could eat.

So we went out to lunch with Michael Zaretsky and his wife, Adrian Parr, whom we were all meeting for the first time.  Hey she has a real Australian accent. Not that I would want her not to, but I didn't think she would for some reason. More importantly, I had the curry.

So Adrian chatted with us for a few and we all decided she's alright and this has the potential to be the best summer of our lives. We had no idea...

Wow, that was a long day, so we take the afternoon off. We used the afternoon/evening to hit up Sydney Harbor, check out the opera house for the first time and mill around downtown. After all that walking, we probably need a drink and why not? We're all legal! We celebrated Ms. Gina Lorubbio's birthday in style. (too bad 21 means nothing here) That's a solid Friday in the great state of New South Wales.

Sydney Harbor at Night

And now onto Saturday…

Saturday was a pretty awesome day, but the weather was not so good, pouring down rain for most of the time that we spent walking around outside. So we started the day pretty early, taking the train all of two stops away to Redfern where we met Caroline Pidcock and her husband, 

both architects familiar with the area and the history of Sydney and surrounds.  We departed from the station on foot to be led around Redfern, which is supposedly not the best neighborhood, but full of character.  First stop, Eveleigh Market.  It’s basically just your average fresh local market where you can find just about anything, cheese to coffee, produce to pastries, bread, oil, wine, meats, might need a toothbrush but I’m ready to live here.  The market is located each Saturday under cover yet still outdoors at an old train station under a canopy that I believe was used for repairing trains as they pass through.

Directly behind the market, in another old train building, is our first taste of the work of Tonkin Zulaihka Greer Architects, Carriageworks. Now an art museum and gallery space, the adaptive reuse of the space leads to an interesting combination of new and old producing a rich contrast which alludes to the spaces prior uses. Throw in a splash of bright orange and fastidious attention to detail and you’ll understand exactly why we like TZG so much.

From there, we continued through the surrounding neighborhoods, looking at Terrace style houses, large glorious looking fig trees, and eventually wandered through Sydney University again for more information and a better tour than we had previously seen.

So after all that walking? To the pub of course. We went to Duck & Swan, a small out of the way bar and restaurant for a glass of wine and further discussion with our tour guides. Turned out to be a pretty nice little day despite the weather, rain won’t bring us down.

And Sunday, finally a day off…

And I say finally as if we’d had so many days of work, but after the trip here, two full days seems like a lot and not doing much Sunday was nice. Andrew Gauggel, Gina, and I decided to be good students and head over to the library at Sydney Uni.  After spending close to two hours there and getting maybe a half hours worth of work done, we decided a bottle of wine would help us focus on our work. So we stopped at the store on the way home, had a bottle of wine, or two, and enjoyed the sites and sounds of King Street in Newtown with cheeks slightly rosier than normal.

Not a bad start at all to 8 weeks in Australia.