Health & Fitness
I’ve begun a new regimen: get up early and run down to the Opera House and back. It’s a bit chilly out there right now, but if I can turn this into a routine, it will stand me in good stead for summer. It’s also a bit dark, at least at first: the sun’s well up in the sky by the time I get to the harbour. Still, as I crest the final hill, the sails of the Opera House appear, poking up above the palms in the conservatory gardens, and I can well imagine them as the sails of a tremendous vessel from the earliest days of exploration and colonization of this continent. They offer an uncanny moment for me each time. The spread of the harbour and the vast scale of the Harbour Bridge also cause me to reflect on Sydney vis a vis other cities I have seen. Like most downtowns, Sydney’s CBD is an agglomeration of skyscrapers, with smaller buildings scattered among them as well. Open public spaces are not unusual either, offering welcome greenery. But the vast cut of the harbour into the city seems to have provided and prevailed upon the city builders to continue an openness that strikes me as quite unique. Remember the first time you ate in a restaurant with an open kitchen? It seemed bigger than the rooms you’d been in previously, and the dining experience seemed more integrated – you could feel that you were truly a part of the entire enterprise, its intent. As I enter the plaza spread along the harbour and in front of the Opera House, even dominated by the “Coat Hanger” as it is, that openness and integration is very much the experience, carried visually, but sensed and felt, not as if you are being embraced by the city, but that you are embracing it. I can’t say I ever got this feeling in NYC, neither at Battery Park nor on the Brooklyn Promenade. Looking out over New York Harbor from the Battery, I would get a sense of possibility, but turning around or standing on the Promenade I would more usually feel the weight of the city, its density, and its power. I rather like the feeling I get here, that I provide the definition of Sydney that I want. It isn’t so much about me, about what possibilities are on offer for me to be or do, but rather about what the place will be because of me. Of course, then I have to swing around and head back uphill. . . .