Open House Sunday

I went to the Rose Seidler House today, which was built by Harry Seidler, an Austrian famous for his architecture. He has contributed quite a few buildings to the Sydney skyline, as well as building this house. The area around the house is beautiful and smells of hickory smoke because at this time of year they are burning some of the bush in the surrounding area to prevent uncontrolled summer bush fires. It smelt amazing as soon as I stepped off the bus.

I was basically in the middle of suburbia though, so my friend Ed who lives near the house joined me with his dad’s car. We took the short tour through the house and watched a video downstairs about the architect. I found it fascinating, but I could tell he was bored (as most guys would be). I was really excited to find a wallaby in the backyard though!

Rose Seidler House

I believe this is a wallaby

We drove over to the nearby Bobbin Head National Park afterward and wandered around for a bit. There were quite a few people there since it was a weekend in the middle of the day and all of the picnic tables were full. We wandered about ten minutes into the bush though and found a shady place to sit and hang out. I was startled when we first sat down because a huge lizard crawled out from under the rock and I thought it was a snake. There was a lot of interesting looking flies and mosquitoes around too. I think it’s because we choose to sit next to a stagnant-looking creek, but it was weird to see the different sorts of bugs they have in Australia.

Bobbin Head

It’s also nice to know someone with a car, as I saved much time and money instead of taking the bus. I also have no idea how I would have caught the bus home from where we were.

Bush walking

I hung out with a guy named Bagel today that I met on Wednesday night. He’s from “the country” of Australia, but not the outback, about 6 hours Southwest of where I am in Sydney. He’s been at Macquarie for three years though, so he definitely knows the area. We went on a nature walk in a national park nearby. It’s actually only 20-25 minutes walking distance from campus. It wasn’t super eventful, but it was fun to have some one-on-one time with an Australian and make fun of our accents together.

He kept calling our walk a “bush walk,” which makes it sound a lot more outdoorsy than it really was. Although I guess at points we were walking on pretty unlevel terrain and across stepping stones on some streams. At the end I basically had to climb up a wall of dirt to get off the trail right by campus otherwise we would have had to keep walking after it got dark (I probably wasn’t dressed entirely correctly for this outing). I did see a wild turkey though! They also had some very Australian signs in the park:

Apparently they have these signs at all the parks

Some pretty stepping stones at the end of the trail

Kangaroo crossing -- sadly I didn't see any