Sydney Festival 2014: Dido and Aeneas

This year, we bought tickets for Syd Festival's headlining 'choreographic opera' Dido and Aeneas for mum's birthday. Seeing it on closing night, I can only say, it was an interesting experience.

I'm not quite sure what to say.

A part of me tried so, so hard to love it. The opening arc was performed in a huge tank that was initially visually grand, but progressively it became messier and messier - a theme that generally translates to what happened over the course of the 1 hour and 40 minutes. Language barriers and accents prevented any real explanation to be given which was pretty vital given that more often than not I was confused with the relevance of what I was seeing and desperately trying to find links with the traditional Dido and Aeneas storyline that I already knew. What confused matters even further was that the opera 'voices' of the eponymous tragic heros were played by a different singer - ie. there were 2 Didos and 2 Aeneas' where one was the dancer and one was the singer. Now call me silly, but I would think if they had a matching costume at least that would make more sense and provide a bit of clarity - otherwise with singers and dancers blurring together, the roles made no sense and produced a fairly incoherent production.

Now don't get me wrong, there were some moments that I enjoyed. About halfway through, I gave up trying to actively understand and appreciated the visual spectacle of it and the fluidity of the dancers movements in conjunction with the voices of the operatic singers. In focusing on the colour, set design, and remarkable staging (brownie points on staging, truly); I felt that I could enjoy the production to some extent. What was unfortunate is every time I began to immerse myself in it, an arc/section finished and suddenly it was a new garbled scene which my brain automatically attempts to make sense of.

Ambitious maybe, but I don't think it was quite my thing. I find myself agreeing with the concepts that Sasha Waltz endeavours into, but I just feel like the execution was just a bit too messy. Unfortunately I have to agree with The Guardian and (oh lord), The Australian.

On a separate note, the music really was breathtakingly beautiful, and the singing was ethereal.

*Disclaimer: All images are not my own

Dessert from Ganache Pâtisserie Francaise

Indeed for New Years we celebrated by eating a Christmas Yule Log, but it was no matter because this cake was absolutely delicious.

Coming from someone who ordinarily doesn't really like to eat cake (unless it's a $4 Coles mudcake or a $90 opera cake), or will be absolutely content with a sliver; this cake is wow. It was rich, but not so rich that you're put off from eating it altogether. In fact, it's rich to the extent that you convince yourselves that it's not very rich, so you go for another mouthful but lo and behold you realise it was indeed pretty rich - do you follow what I mean?

The point that I'm trying to make in my garbled nonsense is this is a damn good cake and it makes me wonder what other delicious madness its origin cooks up.

Many many thanks to Sim for getting the cake and one day I will be trekking down to this wonderful patisserie - I think I may have just found one of my favourite patisseries that is second only to the majestic goodness of La Renaissance.

A Belated Happy New Year to You!

The other day when I was working, I came across this thing called a 'diamante poem'. They're called that because they (how original) look like diamonds, and each line contains nouns, or adjectives etc.

2013

final, end

tiring, illuminating, surprising

how quickly the times go with each passing year

refreshing, changing, liberating

new, different

2014

*Disclaimer: Joe was being a pain in the ass on NYE and every shot was coming out in a very interesting way. That or Joe doesn't like the conditions of Cwilson's apartment and I'm too much of a newbie to adjust accordingly tehe!

And what makes 0 sense about the above photo is that Judi took the same photo with HZ's camera and we're all normal looking. Maybe Live View makes things poopy? Wouldn't be surprised.

There would be more still photos of the midnight hectic fireworks but we decided that I'd video it and HZ would take the stills. Alas, the video recording has some inappropriate-to-be-broadcasted-across-the-world-wide-web content so that won't be here.

I hope you all set out to accomplish if not all, but the majority of your new years resolutions/bucket lists and hope that you all get what you want out of this year!

Forgive the terrible saying that I started saying out of irony but now seems to have stuck with me, but in the words of the lovely TeHe, YOLO LIFE.

Deep Blue

Before starting this blog, I swore that I wouldn't do anything existential, or angsty; because that dominated so much of my previous blogs. I wanted a clean, fresh slate of just happy pictures and my gallivanting around the world with old friends and new ones. Just something I could maybe flick through when I'm older, just to get a feel of what I was doing 'back in the day'.

But I suppose, now, on this off day of mine, I feel like that's unrealistic. We don't all have good days, and that's a very complex statement to say the very least, but it's true. How can I reflect back on my life, without seeing some of the downs I had?

The other day, I was waiting at the train station at night, and I saw this:

Given, it is an NRMA ad, but there was something so lovely about it.

I need to watch a Rom-Com. Recommendations? Hit here, or anything else you'd like to recommend/ask me: http://ask.fm/hullohelen

2014 Bucket List

Ooops I said 'Get my Ps' twice!

Revision: 'Get driving lessons'

Another one I forgot to add: 'Get something published'

Lunch at Bavarian Bier Cafe

After falling off my bike four times, complete with gear grease smeared all over my legs; we escaped the Manly sun by quickly popping into the Bavarian Bier Cafe near the Manly Wharf.

First up, J and I each got the Franziskaner hefe-weissbier hell, aka 'ladies bier', and considering she had the peach one last time, she got a lychee one this time, and I got a peach. It was very refreshing, very good, didn't have the bitter strange taste that beer usually has - or I might just be getting used to the taste of beer.

For the main, I felt like eating something meaty, so got this beast of a burger: the Big Schulz Burger, which had chargrilled wagyu beef, brioche, charred bacon, cheddar, fresh farm egg, onions and bbq sauce. The burger itself was very very delicious, chips crunchy and tasty and everything was perfectly cooked. Only iffy business was the meat was a bit stringy but I dunno, as I say, high high standards for wagyu since coming back from Japan.

Service was extraordinary, atmosphere was very nice and chill.

Anyway, definitely will be back.

Big Kid Decisions

Dull post (no pictures sorry it was too hot and crazy), but a quick recap on today's adventures in the city of Sydney.

So as most of you know, I'm currently in the lovely lull between the HSC and starting uni. Of course part of the latter involves me actually getting into a course that I have some interest in. Friends will say that I've ben pretty damn sporadic about what I want to do in university. In early days it was straight Psychology, then for a long time it was Science (Psych)/Law, then Commerce/Law for the senior years of my high school and finally, post-HSC the goal changed to International Global Studies/Law, then Arts (Psychology)/Law and finally it's now International Global Studies/Law and I'm pretty excited about it to be honest.

Today was pretty damn hectic though, first it was an anachronistic wake up call of 7AM, a healthy migoreng breakfast (as healthy as migoreng can be really), missing the bus to Chatswood (no trains till Chatswood), train-ing it to Redfern and walking the familiar walk to USyd from there.

It's very strange, but when I walk through the walkway into USyd, it's sorta like going home. Lame but in Advanced English terms, I feel like 'I belong there'. Although the same can't be said about UNSW, the area in itself seems so local because school was in that area for 6 years after all.

Who knows though, the options are fairly open. So today consisted of a USyd morning International and Global Studies lecture, walking to Central and catching the bus the UNSW where I had the free sausage sizzle (oomph UNSW, brownie points to you on free food, all I got from USyd was a bottle of water), chatted with some some law kids, went to a law lecture; left early to run back to USyd, chatted with some USyd law kids and then went to the (pretty damn good IMO) USyd law lecture.

I mean all in all, the info days were pretty damn good. That's coming from someone who never bothered to go to the open days though, because I always thought they were semi-pointless.

They're just more useful given that you actually know your ATAR by the time you go to them. Then again, if you have no clue whatsoever what you want to do at uni, the open days wouldn't be too bad I'd imagine.

This was an unnecessarily long post.