Thousands sat down to breakfast on the Sydney Harbour Bridge yesterday after the iconic structure was closed to traffic and carpeted with grass for the first time for a giant picnic.
About 6,000 early risers were on the steel bridge from 6:30am to take part in the two-hour event designed to showcase Sydney’s best food and outdoor lifestyle.
While accordion players and trumpeters provided background music, those who had won tickets to the picnic in a random lottery munched on fruit, pastries, muesli, yoghurt and the staple Australian breakfast spread, Vegemite.
PHOTO: AFP
“It’s amazing to see the bridge in this perspective,” Sydneysider Don Fuchs said of the structure, which is used by about 100,000 cars daily. “Usually you sit in the car, you cross it and that’s it.”
“It was beautiful,” said Linda Curnow who attended the picnic with her family. “The grass was so thick it was like being in your backyard.”
New South Wales state Premier Nathan Rees said the event was set to become an annual feature of Sydney’s month-long October food festival.
About 45,000 people applied for tickets to the breakfast, for which people brought their own food but were able to taste samples from some of the state’s best producers.
“I don’t think we were ever doubtful of the success of this event today,” a government spokesman said. “It was a unique world first for this iconic attraction. This type of event typifies the Australian personality.”
Organizers are planning to use about 40 percent of the grass on Sydney parks.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
RSS