Sydney Opera House
Jan 23rd, 2008 by Nick
I overslept this morning, but fortunately the sunlight woke me up at 8:20am. Today was going to be a very busy day, and I couldn’t afford to start late!
The first stop of the day was the Sydney Opera House. I had purchased a ticket for the tour for the first Sunday of the vacation, but I was in the emergency room at the time so that did not quite work out. So today was my last shot at getting in the tour. I arrived at 9:40am and bought a ticket for the 10am tour. With 20 minutes to kill, I got a quick breakfast at the kiosk next to the tour meeting point, and then James came along to take about 30 of us on the tour.
The tour was supposed to take an hour, but ended up taking 80 minutes as we were fortunate to have the main concert hall empty. The phrase “Sydney Opera House” is misleading; the facility has a symphony hall, a drama/opera hall, and three smaller theaters. There is something going on almost every day of the year, including sometimes school groups (it is owned by the state government).
The building is fascinating inside and out. The two largest halls are completely self-contained wooden structures that do not touch the concrete shell at any part. We were able to spend some time at the top of both of them, to get a sense of their size. The building is in dire need of some mobility enhancements, as there are no elevators or escalators to get to the upper levels. Enhancements are planned, but the total cost (including some renovations to the opera hall) are over A$600 million, so it might take a while.
The original budget in the early 1960s was A$7 million, the final total was A$102 million… they had to run a lottery to help raise funds to cover the difference. The tour tries to gloss over the controversy around how the original architect got fired, by emphasing that he’s working on the rennovations now and they’ve named a room after him. But it appears to have been a rather messy situation.
After 80 minutes of covering a significant portion of the complex, the tour ended and I made my way to Circular Quay for a trip to the zoo.
