Sydney: Then and Now

Today was another great day at (well, out of) the office.  I did some desk work in the morning, finishing up cataloging the photos I had taken on Wednesday of the Heritage Items.  It was really fun to go through the photos I had taken and use the Heritage database to enter in various information.  I love the 'Then and Now' book series with contemporary and historic photos of the same thing side-by-side, and every so often it turned out I had taken photos from the same angle as some of the historic images we have in the database!

Strand Arcade, built in 1891, with the photo from our database from the 1970s and mine from today.

By afternoon I was back out on George Street.  This time, armed with a laser (albeit a small one, designed to calculate distances without much effort) to measure the heights of awnings on the southern and northern ends of the street.  I was bouncing around from one end of George to the other, so I found myself taking the train to and from Central as I finished my loop at the southern end of George.

Waiting in the sunlight for a clockwise City Circle train at Central.

The late afternoon, after I was done with the field work, was a few mundane but necessary tasks, before the 4:30 presentation I mentioned previously.

The presentation, by a member of the firm Gehl out of Copenhagen (who is currently working for the City of Sydney), was all about creating a plan for Christchurch, NZ, after it was decimated by an earthquake last year.  With over 50% of the buildings in the city entirely destroyed, the task was one of epic proportions.  That being said, within a few months a plan had been developed (with a lot of interaction and support from the residents of Christchurch) and things are now moving forward.  Many of the issues which came up reminded me of New Orleans post-Katrina.  I think Christchurch was handled much, much better.

I left work around 6:00 and enjoyed a walk through the post-work crowds in the CBD.  I did some last minute packing (no surprise there) and Amanda came by about 7:15 to get me.  When we got to ‘the house’ Kylie was beginning dinner (tacos!).  I helped in the kitchen a bit and we sat down to a big Mexican “feast-a” (Kylie was going for ‘fiesta’, but didn’t quite get the Spanish out) around 8:00.

Tacos!

After dinner we watched ‘Batman – The Dark Knight’ in preparation for the release of the new movie (Candice is a massive fan of Batman).  It's around midnight and we are all off to bed as Amanda and I had to be up for our flight very early (as I mentioned at the beginning).