Sydney City Tour

Throughout my time in Sydney, I learned a lot about the city. A lot of what I learned was about the Sydney Opera House.  One thing I found interesting was that they did not budget their time or their money well at all.  They had planned on taking approximately three years to build the Opera House but it ultimately took them sixteen years.  They had also budgeted around $7 million to pay for it but it ended up costing them $102 million.  The architect of the building won the competition because his design was the only submission that placed the houses next to each other rather than one in front of the other. He also left Sydney to go home since there was so much pressure to finish the project.  There was so much pressure that he didn’t even design the inside of the Opera House. Even after it was built, he never returned to Sydney to see the finished result. We had learned some things about the Opera House (who designed it, when it was built etc.) but these details were extremely interesting to me and made the experience even better.

I did learn a good amount about the Sydney Harbor Bridge.  This bridge and the Opera House are the two main attractions and it was interesting to learn more about them.  I learned that the bridge is a suspension bridge.  When they started building the bridge, they built it from both sides so they would come together in the middle.  However, the finished product left a gap between the two sides that was about 3 feet long.  For this, all they did was put in a few bolts to close the gap.  The most fascinating part about the bridge is that because of the placement of the cables, the cement road going over the bridge is literally holding itself up and is essentially hanging in mid-air.  This was surreal going from the classroom presentations seeing pictures of this bridge to seeing it in person. Me and some other classmates had a small discussion while looking up at the bridge from the water.  This was a harmless discussion and was based off of pure curiosity.  We were thinking about if someone were to free fall from the top of the bridge, how many seconds would it take for that person to reach the water?  After a lot of discussion and arguments, we pulled out an equation that calculated the time to be approximately 5.33 seconds.  That was also another fun fact I learned about the Sydney Harbor Bridge that I will probably remember for a long time.

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