Second city of sights

The stop at Canberra resulted in most of the unpleasant experiences of road trip occurring in one place. At the top of this list was camping in temperatures that reached as low as -3.7 degrees followed by sharing showers with one thousand other people which resulted in semi regular hygiene practices. Canberra also tops the list for new and strange experiences. So many people sharing one camping ground resulted in the private act of going to the toilet was no longer so private. Blokes will blokes and so we just got too it. This meant that for the first time in my life whilst taking a crap i had an in depth conversation with the bloke in the cubical next to me. This is how I met Dilshan. (I will introduce Dilshan in a latter post)
Common belief is that Canberra is a hole and many people say that it is probably out of simple rivalry for another capital city rather then any actual educated opinion. Whilst its minimum temperature has something to be desired I did actually quite like Canberra and some of the sights we saw. So my opinion is canberra is not so bad. I did not get much time here only two days to be exact but what i saw and some of the places I saw were amazing. However on this trip i spent more time in Universities then all my years combined and I feel that of the ones I saw ANU (Canberra university) can not compete with Sydney universities when it comes to architecture and beauty. Sydney wins every time. Once again these photos are not mine but are borrowed with permission from Sonia Preisser.

Hip to be a Square

Road trip was full of events that pushed me out of my comfort zone. I have already discussed this a little in an early post where I talked about Terrigal beach and Camron but there were many more events that pushed me out of my comfort zones, chanting in Manly, running down a tunnel in central station making that huge scene I discussed earlier and leaping around Gosford dressed in pink are all things that I struggled to just "go with the flow" of but none of them matched up to the Martin place stunt. Planned to be a massive media stunt with both the New South Wales team and the Western Australia team resulted in over three hundred people trying to perform a choreographed dance we all learnt the night before. It looked like a disaster waiting to happen.
Three hundred young people filtered down into martin place in an attempt to look natural and not draw attention to ourselves. (I don't know how well that worked)
With every one in place two large speakers started to boom out a song through Sydney CBD and four of the team started the dance. The dance was a square dance with the same ten moves repeated over and over each time rotating to a different direction. As the starting four turned to face a new direction people joined the dance, and it continued with each time the dance changing direction more and more people joined until all three hundred of us were doing the dance. When it all finished all dancers fell to the ground to represent the dieing people across the globe, while an announcement was made about the Make Poverty History campaign. It all went like clockwork and I believe was highly effective.
Latter in the day we performed the dance again down in Circular Quay. The photo here shows the end of the dance.
I somehow got past my fear of worrying about how stupid I looked and I'm glad I did. I would hate to look back on the event ten years from now and say I did not have the courage to be part of something that changed the world. This photo is stolen with permission from Sonia Presser.

City of Sights

When you live in an area for an extended period of time you slowly grow numb to the awesomeness of the local sights. I feel i am no exception to this, growing up on Sydney's Northern Beaches the sights from North head, Manly or Palm beach are now the norm. Even the local shopping center Warringah Mall is fairly impressive for an open aired shopping mall. Seeing these things semi-regularly, you lose appreciation for the splendor of them which I am sure happens to everyone within their own communities and we are pleasantly reminded of how amazing some of our local sights are when a visitor pops in and reminds us of it. This also seems to apply with the spectacular sights of my home city which are known globally. Sights such as darling harbor, the opera house and the Harbor Bridge have also slipped into my field of everyday sights that I'm tired of. Departing from my home for a small period of time and returning again I thought I would possibly appreciate these sights more, however I did not. That is until I came across some photos from a fellow road tripper who was more then willing to share these photos with me. These are the photos I am sharing in this post and the photos were all taken by Sonia Preisser who does use her photos in competitions so I am thrilled to have been given permission to publish them in my blog. The photos caught me with the beauty of the locations shot just as much as some of the engineering involved in building some of these structures. As I'm sure you will agree I do have some awesome sights in my home city its a shame i have grown a little numb to them.