Gurangai Festival

On Saturday there was a festival combined with a market in North Sydney: the ultimate combination for me! The market is a weekly food/craft/farmer's market, and the festival was the Gurangai Festival. It's a yearly festival that's meant to raise awareness of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people that originally lived in the area. The festival actually goes on for a month with different events, but I thought it would be nice to check it out along with the market. So off I went!

The market is held in a parking garage, which is good for rainy days but makes everything really dark.

There were some of the usual things like antiques:

But also some very Gurangai-specific things, like this bush tucker vendor:

Everything on the menu made me feel very sad but it was interesting!

There was also a basket-weaving class, but I had just missed the beginning so I didn't go join in. But besides those things and a couple art displays, I have to say that I was a little disappointed at how generic the festival-market was. Maybe I need to go try one of the other festival events! =)

On the bright side, I did get some great produce from this guy selling stuff off his truck!

And it was also gummy bear giveaway day!

 

Who can complain about a day like that!?

 

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Mini road trip to Sea Cliff Bridge

Monday was the Queen's Birthday - happy birthday to Her Majesty!

And because it was such an important day, we got the day off. So I booked a GoGet car, packed some snacks, and tricked Toby into taking a mini road trip south of Sydney to see the Sea Cliff Bridge.

The Sea Cliff Bridge is a pretty new bridge: the road it carries goes down along the coast to Wollongong. Up until 2005, the road went along the side of the cliffs, but it kept getting washed out and destroyed by rockslides. So the clever Aussies decided enough was enough and built this bridge to parallel the cliff but out over the water - far enough that future rock slides would miss it.

The bridge isn't terribly long, but it's really beautiful: the ocean on one side and cliffs on the other.

There's a pedestrian side on the bridge so people can walk across and check out the ocean below. Which of course I thought we should do! From the bridge we could see some fishermen...

And these super cool rocks...

And most of all just the awesome sights of the bridge!

It was a wonderful Queen's Birthday!

 

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Weekend walk to Circular Quay and beyond

Sunday was supposed to be rainy, so before the weather turned bad I headed out for a morning walk. I didn't have a set destination in mind, so I decided to see where my feet would take me.

Up on to the bridge...

Across Circular Quay...

Towards the Botanic Gardens...

Somehow all these flowers are still blooming even though it's officially winter!

Around to the Chief Secretary's Building...

And finally back across the bridge to home!

And I balanced out all that walking with a trip to Lord of the Fries with T later in the day. Don't want to be getting too healthy! =)

He was obviously not so happy about be taking his picture.

Yay for lazy Sundays!

 

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Me + Vivid = True love forever

This is the last weekend of Vivid, which is very sad news. So on Friday night, I walked over to the Rocks and down to Luna Park to make sure I could soak up as much Vivid goodness as possible while it's still here!

There were lots of greats of little light installations tucked around the Rocks.

One of my favorites was this interactive display where you could make a symbol with your hand and it was displayed on a wall with all the other people's hands.

My other favorite was this display where you could walk under glass bottles that were lit up and hung from scaffolding.

There were also these cool guys walking in silence and not blinking. So cool!

Another high on my favorites list was this walkway, which was supposed to give you the feel of walking under the Aurora Australis.

And besides all my favorites, there were tons of other cool spots.

And my walk back to our side of the harbour was just as good.

There aren't too many lights on our side of the bridge, but like last year, people can choose the colors for the bridge.

It was an awesome evening - so many lights to love!

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