Serious sensory overload

After three days of this I'm ready for a long vacation.
Yesterday morning we took a boat ride around Sydney Harbor. The Sydney Opera House is one of those icons that you have seen so often that you think, "this can't possibly be the real thing. This must be a cheap imitation made of pressboard."
After the boat ride we went to the museum of contemporary art which is right on the water. I guarantee that we were the only two people in the group who went there, even though the admission is free(!). It's first-class; all the work we saw was excellent and quite Australian. I notice that wherever you go, at least half of all contemporary art is photography or video. Our favorite was a video by a performance collective called Kingpin; they are four attractive women who like to dress up like men. in this case, they put on blond mustaches and fake zits, put on matching warmup suits and did synchronized calisthnetics in a series of Starbucks until the management told them to leave. We were laughing our asses off though the other museumgoers stood looking a little unsure of how they should react.
In the afternoon we went to a church out in the suburbs and did a workshop with two Australian choirs followed by a group concert in the church. I really liked how their music was very indigenous; they did things in aboriginal dialect and included bird and jungle sounds; some of it sounded just like the "nature" loop on our clock-radio. it would be lovely to fall asleep to.
While they did aboriginal songs, we sang gospel. Competition: whose oppressed minority's music is better? Of course, I like ours better. Meanwhile, their choirs contained no aborigines and ours no blacks. One Australian even asked why we didn't have any blacks in our choir.
We sang "You'll Never Walk Alone" and an Aussie commented afterwards that he had never realized that that was a Broadway song, since Jerry and the Pacemakers recorded it in the 60s and it is still used as a Liverpudlian football fight song. "Yeah," I commented, "that's like the Beatles recording 'Till There Was You.'" He was stunned and said, "You mean McCartney didn't write that??"
I like how the Aussies have an unselfconscious love of their country. In America, half of the people are a little ashamed of their country and the other half says, "I love America, except for about half of the people in it."
Today we drove to a little zoo where we had probably our only chance to pet koalas and kangaroos. Then we rode on the steepest (practically vertical) cable train in the world and rode a sky tram back. A wild parrot ate off jennifer's hand.
Then we ate dinner at a German restaurant: strudel, schnitzel, schnapps, beer, and lots of approximate harmony singing.
Cassie (probably the only white woman within a thousand miles with dreadlocks set in curls) bought about thirty shots of apple schnapps and was walking around like the Saint Pauli girl offering them on a tray to whoever. She is our mascot and head cheerleader and no matter how drunk and disorderly you may be she is always two notches to the left.
Tomorrow we have a noon concert in a huge Anglican cathedral! I hope they have a real piano this time; apparently that is not a given around here.