We started today in the Suez Canal. See the pictures if you don’t believe me. Actually it was a walking tour of “The Rocks”, the original settlement of Sydney where the convicts lived and built the city. The “Canal” was a hilly narrow lane where basically all garbage and other unpleasant items were dumped so they would flow into the harbor when it rained. The tour was quite interesting and very informative about Australia’s origins. Many prisoners were sent here for 7 years to life for offenses as trivial as stealing a piece of lace or a morsel of food.
We then went back uptown to tour the Great Synagogue. There are about 60,000 Jews in Sydney but like in most places I know many have moved out to the suburbs. This synagogue still has about 800 families and is the spiritual “center” of Australian Judaism. A fantastic lunch and then we strolled the main park in the city, Hyde Park down the botanical gardens. The snails we learned are here for a month and are tied into a national awareness of recycling as they are all made of recycled materials. We wound up at the Sydney Opera House, but more on that on the next post.
