Last day in Sydney

It's been a long time since I've been in a city where I thought, "I could live here." Sydney has the charm of Seattle or San Francisco, world-class culture, and great weather. it bustles, but it doesn't seem frenetic. And it's clean.
yesterday I went with my mother to the Art Gallery of New South Wales which is the main art museum here. While we were waiting for it to open we were talking about tipping, when an Aussie broke in and told us that tipping is not customary in Australia. Then she surprised us by saying that based on her experiences, Americans are more service oriented and more polite!
The museum is almost entirely Australian artists. They have a large permanent collection covering from the 18th through 20th century but also had a big installation of the Sydney Biennial. In a main hallway was a big piece all about surveillance. The flourescent tubes in the ceiling were mounted on servos and they moved in response to people walking down the corridor like ripples on a stream. In the entrance hallway was a huge installation of almost 7,000 small canvasses each one of which had a phrase in New Zealand english written on it. Funny and amazing.
After that we rejoined the group and took a tour of the famous Sydney Opera House. I always say that the pantheon is my favorite building but the SOH is a close second. The choir was miffed that they hadn't managed to arrange a performance there but they got a consolation prize by singing one song from the seats of the opera theater during the tour. The tourguide seemed genuinely impressed.
Then we went to an opal dealer. This was for me the low point of the trip... this seemed like a classic tourist trap. We first sat in a little room done up to look like an underground mine (there were even miner's helmets you could wear). The video was so old that they still gave temperature in Farenheit, which Australia hasn't used since the sixties. At the very end, the walls of the room shook to simulate a mine collapse.
Lots of people bought opals, though, including my mother, who bought some earrings for over $800! She says that when she dies, Rachel can have them.
Then we had dinner in the Sydney Tower, which is a high rotating restaurant like the Space Needle. It has a really mediocre buffet and a photographer was going around taking everyone's picture and trying to sell the prints. Again, a tourist trap.
After dinner, about a dozen of us went back to the Opera House, three for opening night of Turandot, and the others for A Large Attendance at the Anteroom, an off-the-mainstream piece about a 19th century scientist who founded eugenics. It was funny and thought-provoking in parts and had by far the tiniest set in theater history but was a little too self-referential for my taste or maybe I was just tired. Anyway, he's performed it hundreds of times all over the world and it was well worth seeing and we were at the Sydney opera House!
This morning we're taking the bus to Cairns, which is pronounced "cans" by Ozzies and "Cairrrns" by our Irish/Scottish tourguide.