Blog Loglaw: New Zealand: Transpacific: Part 1

This is the first post detailing my month-long excursion in which I basically live on a plane. I'm not saying that I'm a jet-setter or anything, but by mid-May when I return to Auckland I will have spent 53 hours in air transit, covering roughly 41,000 kms (25,500 miles, not quite around the world). There's only so many times you can watch the new James Bond movie (which was crap) on a 15 hour flight.

Luckily for me from a financial perspective, most of my trip is funded by Siemens Healthcare and the University of Auckland. And they even booked my plane tickets and a few accommodations:

"Doctor (not a real doctor)" Eric Schrauben. Please don't steal my Qantas points.

My first week has been spent in Sydney, ("the Harbour City") Australia. From a tourist's standpoint, it has not been a productive week. I've spent the majority of everyday in a classroom at the local Siemens Healthcare Education Centre learning how to manipulate MRI scanners in C++ programming. This is what the (capital A) Adults would label a 'business' trip, ugh. The course is located just off the campus of Macquarie University, which is really nice and new and beautiful, but also about 45 minutes from downtown Sydney via public transit. So yeah, it's been a little dull. The good news, aside from my cushy air-conditioned hotel room, is that I got most of Sunday to explore Sydney on my own.

Let me just say this, in a few sentences, to point out how quickly someone can (seemingly) fully explore a city when they are by themselves. Travelling in general by yourself just goes faster. Instead of worrying about the rest of group staying together, you just go. The same goes for a new place; every tourist attraction takes so much less time to experience/see when you don't have to take a plethora of photos with other people, or discuss its beauty, historical significance, overcrowdedness, overratedness, etc. It's not necessarily better, just different, in a faster sort of way.

Anyway, this is precisely what I did in a 6 hour period in Sydney on my only free day, which happened to be mostly cloud-covered and muggy.

For my Auckland friends. This is what traffic-free Auckland looks like at 6 am on a Sunday morning. Astounding I know.

Even though Australia and New Zealand are relatively geographically close to each other, the similarities are only relative. I've gotten used to the flora, fauna, and food of Auckland. But in Sydney these are just different enough that I felt obliged to take a few pictures:

Bird of Paradise outside of Siemens Healthcare in Macquarie.

Sulphur-crested Cockatoo, surprising in size and audibly distressing.

Australian white ibis. A strange combination of vulture, goose, and heron. I was entranced by and hated these, simultaneously.

All the macaron flavo(u)rs. Designed by celebrity chef Adriano Zumbo, dubbed Zumbarons.

Sydney Chinatown. I'm a sucker for big rainy-day bowls of steaming spicy Ramen-esque things.

I spent several hours walking near the Sydney harbour. The city has a truly excellent waterfront. Sydney is probably most well-known for its opera house, which doubles as a dish-drying rack if looked at from the correct angle:

There are so many other comparisons. Source.

Really though, it is an impressive piece of architecture. And to think it only took 15 years of mind-bending architectural and engineering design and execution.