Walking around the city

I'm a walker. Whenever I have a chance to do so, I walk. Occasionally I do some bushwalking but if I don't have a chance to get out of the city I just walk around where I live which is in Sydney. And Sydney is a great city for walking. I will never run out of new places to go but sometimes just a walk around the inner city is the most rewarding. On the weekend I walked to the Art Gallery of New South Wales which is about one hour's walk from where my wife and I live. While the collection of paintings isn't anything like the great art galleries of Europe and the USA it has a wonderful collection of Australian paintings. It also has special exhibitions such as the two that are currently on show: one of photographs by the American photographer, Alfred Stieglitz, and another of English Victorian paintings and sculpture. One of the wonderful things about the Art Gallery of NSW is that it's free. Sometimes there's a charge to see the special exhibitions but you can skip those and see everything else for free. The Art Gallery also has lots of special events such as the concert that was happening when I was there on Sunday.

And when I go to the Art Gallery I often go to the Botanic Gardens as well. This time was no exception. In addition to the huge collection of plants and flowers there are always other things to see. This time I spent a while watching a colony of stingless Australian bees going in and out of their nest in a log. Australia has a huge variety of insects that don't exist anywhere else in the world.

The Botanic Gardens has a big problem with grey-headed fruit bats, or "flying foxes" as we usually call them. There is a big colony in the trees in the gardens and it's not good for the trees or the plants below the bats. They're beautiful animals and they are native so no one would want to get rid of them but, at the same time, the people who run the Gardens wish the bats would find somewhere else to live.