"Manly Food and Wine Festival"

One of the best tourist deals and coolest things to do in Sydney is to take the ~30-minute ferry ride from Circular Quay up to Manly beach. The ferry goes by all the way up the harbour, passing all the main sites including the Harbour Bridge and the Sydney Opera House.

(I would like to take this opportunity to retract my earlier statements about the Sydney Opera House. After seeing it again from different angles in different daylights and without the effects of jet-lag, it is truly a magnificent structure. The tiles aren’t completely white and a renovation is planned for the coming years, but that not-withstanding it is breath-taking).

Once the ferry leaves the CBD (Central Business District – Australian for downtown), the ride takes passengers passed many of the larger houses, through heaps of sailboats, and finally to Watson’s Bay and the last inlet until getting to the Pacific before dropping passengers off in Manly.

Manly is a cool little beach town that is a little bit nicer than Bondi. The development is more recent, and there’s been more central planning so that the residential areas go off the main commercial street. The beach itself was not as wide as Bondi, with the waves being smaller as well.

We went for the Food & Wine Festival. It was a great time. The food wasn’t much to speak of but the wine was great. Many of the local vineyards were giving glasses out for a few bucks. The coolest thing about it though was an innovative device that I can’t believe I’ve never seen before – a wine coozie!

The wine coozie is connected to a lanyard and cradles the wine glass so people can keep the glass around their neck without any hands. It’s my first souvenir in Australia and I’ll keep using it in the states. On second thought, that may make me the “wine coozie” guy – maybe I’ll leave that here.