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.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
RSS