when auntie jingga invited me to fly to sydney at the end of my clinicals, of course i was psyched! i’ve never been to sydney. and when i thought of sydney, i immediately thought of the ever-famous opera house, as well as the equally famous harbour bridge — two of the prominent architectural features plastered on travel brochures together with images of a koala bear graphically designed to have intense eye contact with you like it’s sending out a telepathic message urging you to throw caution to the wind and hop on a plane to sydney stat.

the koala might be biased but it has a reason to be. sydney is beautiful in her own right. just a little too crowded though, but that i blame on the fact that when i went there last june, it was a long weekend and it seemed as if 60% of australia’s population got the koala bear’s memo and headed out to new south wales to go on a holiday to celebrate the queen’s birthday.

carrying a weekend’s worth of backpack on my shoulders straight from the airport, i have to admit walking around the CBD area was kind of exhausting but there were several diversions along the way.

one, there was this artist drawing a massive artwork depicting a rather disturbing picture of the tragedy that befell on the passengers of the french merchant ship, the medusa, in 1816. according to the story, when the ship ran aground, the captain and his officers saved themselves and left the passengers and crew to fend for themselves. out of whatever material they could gather, they made a life raft out of it which i figured must have been quite big or the initial survivors quite skinny because apparently, 151 men and 1 woman were able to fit in it. oh, and i say “initial” survivors because after 11 days on the sea, the situation became like that of world war Z and only 15 people made it alive. if a passing english ship didn’t come in the story, god knows how many of those 15 people would have ultimately survived. ancient tragedy.

two, mcdonald’s was packed. that alone is another tragedy, albeit a modern-day one, when you’re hungry as hell and just wanna world war Z a quick bite. (wait, why does that sound so morbid?)

anyhow, because it was a festival of lights and all (and it wasn’t even christmas then), here are some of my favorite highly artistic images LEDified (or whatever) on to a huge canvas that was an old building in sydney’s CBD: