I flew to Sydney, Australia on Tuesday, September 17, 2019, arriving at 7am on Thursday, September 19 (thanks to the 16 hour time difference and the date line). On the flight from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles, I sat next to a guy from Australia who now lives in Herriman (the city next to Riverton). He found that the trick to switching sides of the road for driving was to imagine "hugging the center" with whichever side of the car the driver's seat is on.
When I got to Sydney, I met up with two guys from work, Steven Lyde and Jon Morrey, as well as a fellow from Ancestry.com. We had all day to explore Sydney, since we had to wait until 9pm to go to sleep in order to have any chance at overcoming jet lag. So we stashed our bags at Jon's hotel and went on a "walkabout" to explore Sydney, ultimately walking about 9 miles that first day.
We unfortunately took a path through a large construction area that took 20 minutes to get through, but then stumbled across the Barangaroo Reserve, which had a cool stepped shoreline and woodsy paths overlooking the Harbor.
Eventually we walked under the Harbor Bridge and got our first view of the iconic Sydney Opera House.
That afternoon, Steven and I checked into the AirBnB that we were sharing (after some delay, since the previous guest had forgotten to leave the key), and then took the "train" (metro/subway) to the Green Square Library, which had some interesting things like a room with the spines of discarded books all covered in rainbow colors.
I picked a random book off the shelf and read the first chapter (It appeared to be talking about some people who saw a one-horned animal jump off a ship into the harbor, and they thought it was a unicorn. I'll never know how that turned out).
Later we walked through Hyde Park, and I thought it was cool that they had ibises walking all around, along with the typical pigeons and seagulls. I guy I was talking with told me that they call them "bin chickens" because they're always in the garbage bins.
While in Hyde Park, we saw some guys playing giant chess, so we sat and watched for a while. We had fun talking with a local bloke as we watched.
At the south end of Hyde Park is the ANZAC World War I memorial. (ANZAC stands for Australia and New Zealand Army Corps).
Inside is a poignant sculpture helping us remember the sacrifice of those who served in the war.
Thursday night, my friend Tim Stokes came to have dinner with us. He was born in Australia, lived in London for 10 years after he was married, and then worked with me at FamilySearch for 3 and a half years before returning to Sydney. Tim is hilarious and can lay down a thick Aussie accent when he means to.
He told us about a Malaysian dish called "laksa" that has become really popular in Sydney, and took us to the little hole-in-the-wall food court restaurant called The Happy Chef where "it all started". It was sketchy-looking and really tasty.
Tim also got me and Steven an Australian ginger beer, which is like ginger ale with a little stronger taste.
Steven and I stayed in a 2-bedroom AirBnB apartment that was 7 minutes from our conference. (It cost the same as one hotel room, but was way nicer, and allowed us to stretch the budget enough for Steven to be able to attend the conference). It had a balcony that was lovely for "gazeebing" (reading scriptures outside in the morning).
We hit a grocery store to get food for breakfast. I got some cereal that was just right.
I also got two kinds of Tim Tams, which are amazing "biscuits" (cookies) with chocolate cookies, chocolate or mint or caramel filling, and dipped in chocolate. If you bite off two corners, you can suck milk or hot chocolate through them like a straw, and it softens them up so they melt in your mouth. This is know as a "Tim Tam Slam." Which I did most mornings with the leftover milk from my cereal. It was "tasty as." (Aussies will often say things like "That's awesome as," and let your imagination fill in the blank.)
I attended the Historical Image Processing workshop (HIP 2019) the first day, some tutorials the next couple of days, and then the actual International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2019). On the way to the workshop, we saw some funky architecture.
At lunch that first day, we were joined for lunch at a cheap Korean place by a cool Romanian guy named "Chip" (short for something longer) who was working in Switzerland. Below at our table are me, Chris Tensmeyer (former BYU Ph.D. student who now works for Adobe), Jon Morrey (manager of FamilySearch's Advanced Technology Research team), Steven Lyde (from my team at work, and roomie for the week) and Chip.
Speaking of eating, we had some nice pizza with the organizers of the HIP workshop. It was fun to talk with them about the places they were from, which included Italy, Greece, France and other places. (Just on the far side of me is Ty Davies, who is one of the main managers at FamilySearch).
Our AirBnB was on the edge of Chinatown, so during that first week, I felt more like I was in Shanghai than Sydney, since I heard Chinese on the streets and then accents from around the world at the conference.
One morning I stopped in at the science museum, and the coolest thing there was this huge model of the moon (see the people below it).
I handled the jet lag pretty well on the way there, sleeping 11 hours the first night and then sleeping like 10pm-5am every day after that. However, the second night there, I don't think I fell asleep at all. That made this sign at the parking garage seem appropriate.
Saturday evening I joined the FamilySearch guys for a ferry ride out to the cute coastal town of Manly for dinner. The ferry offers the best views of the harbor bridge and especially the opera house as you go right around it.
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| Jon Morrey, Derek Dobson, Randy Wilson, Ty Davies; Chris Tensmeyer, Steven Lyde. |
On the ferry, a group of high school kids started talking to me. "Are you American?" they asked. I said I was. "We love your accent," they said, and I returned the compliment. "Have you met any movie stars?" they asked, which I thought was hilarious as the first thing they would want to know. I talked with them most of the way there because I thought their accents were adorable.
We had some great fish and chips at a restaurant called Fish Mongers in Manly.
There were great "Manly" signs all around.
The harbor bridge looked great on the chilly ferry ride home.
There was a "light the city" night going on at Mrs. Macquarie's Point that night, and as we went under the Harbor Bridge, the spotlights beyond the Opera House made it look like, "Tuh-Duh!!!"
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| Sydney Opera House from under the Harbor Bridge, with "Light the City" going on behind it at Mrs. Macquarie's Point. |
Every Saturday evening at 8:30pm this year (July-July) there are fireworks in Darling Harbor. We timed it so that we were approaching the fireworks on a ferry to Darling Harbor just as they started up, so we got to see them reflected off the water, which was beautiful.
That evening, Steven and I walked across town to go see the "light the city" stuff. But we were blocked by a locked gate. A lady told us to go up by the Opera House to get in, but that was locked, too. Another guy told us we had to walk all the way around, which was going to be a couple of miles, and my feet and back had had it, so we got an Uber for $10 Australian (=$6.67 US), and it was totally worth it. That was my first ever Uber ride.
The light the city thing was pretty cool, though if we had had any Australian cash on us, we could have "hired" (rented) bikes and spared our feet a bit.
The view of the Opera House and Harbor Bridge from Mrs. Macquarie's Point was lovely.
Some of the tree trunks in the park were amazing!
As we walked through the park, I saw a little strange animal with a bushy tail. I made a little t-t-t sound (like you might use to call a kitty), and the animal stopped and walked right over to me. Apparently it's used to getting food from people.
My friend Tim Stokes later told me that this was an opossum, and I didn't believe him at first, but it turned out to be a "bush-tailed opossum", so that was cool.
On the long walk back to the apartment, we saw that the Sydney Town Hall was lit up all cool like.
On Sunday, Steven and I took the bus to church. It turns out that you can travel as far as you want on public transportation on Sundays for a total of A$2.80 for the day (including bus, trains, ferries), so that was sweet.
After church, they had a "linger longer" with wraps, fruit, "biscuits" (cookies) and "cookies" (because that recipe was from an American member).
We attended the Summerhill ward, which was the same ward that Tim Stokes is in, and that my BYU friend Dan Ventura had attended for a few months when he was living here earlier in the year for six months as a Fulbright Scholar. So I had fun talking to people who knew both of them. Unfortunately, Tim wasn't able to make it there that day.
As we waited for the bus back, we noticed what looked like a hobbit door on the other side of this hedge.
On the bus, it was funny to see a guy hop on with a surf board. Not something you ever see in Salt Lake City.
The conference held a welcome reception at the Maritime Museum, and there were cool boat displays inside.
And there were some cool real ships outside as well.
Monday night after the conference, the FamilySearch guys had dinner at a Brazilian barbeque place. My favorite thing at those is always the grilled pineapple. This place took it up a notch by rolling the pineapple in cinnamon sugar.
At the opening of the official conference, an aboriginal guy painted up in traditional style came to the pulpit to "acknowledg the Traditional Owners of the land on which we are meeting, the Gadigal people, and pay respect to their Elders, past, present and emerging." This has become a tradition throughout Australia.
During the conference, there was a lot of talk about character recognition, handwriting recognition, how to recognize the content of tables in documents, how to read Japanese text, and so on, all using things like deep learning neural networks. So there was a lot of stuff like this (which I personally find fascinating):
Tuesday afternoon the conference took a big group photo on the front steps of the International Conference Center (ICC).
Tuesday night the conference provided a dinner at Luna Park, which is an old-fashioned amusement park with an infamous entrance.
On Wednesday afternoon (my time), Linette and our friends were boarding planes Tuesday night (their time) to head to Australia. So when I saw this thing in the lobby of the ICC, I thought it was appropriate to send along.
The aboriginal art makes heavy use of dots, which sometimes freaks your eyes out (especially if you click this image and look at it full sized).
Tim Stokes joined us again that evening, and took us to a place called Ribs & Burgers at The Rocks (an old historic part of town at the base of the Harbor Bridge). He introduced us to the "Aussie Burger", which includes beet root, pineapple and a fried egg, among other things.
The conference was great, and I also had fun exploring the area on the off hours. I also looked forward to the arrival of Linette and our friends, and was glad I would know enough to be able to show them around.
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