Youuuuu Light Up My Life: The Vivid Festival

In a rare display of spontaneity, Partner-in-Crime and I forewent our previously scheduled Friday Night Scrabble Game and rode the ferry into town for the first night of the Vivid Festival's light displays at Circular Quay.

If you're not familiar, Circular Quay is a wharf bounded on one side by the Opera House, the other by a cruise ship terminal, with the public transport ferry wharfs in the middle. On land, it is a hub of restaurants, museums, tourist shops, and small parks. For the festival, the whole area was host to a multitude of light installations, many of them interactive. And many of them super-duper cool.

If there are two things that Sydney excels at, they are:

1. Fabulous family friendly outdoor festivals

2. Lights! Bright! Shiny! Lights!

Put the two together, and you have Sydney at its best. If you are a Sydneysider, I highly recommend dedicating an evening to wandering around all of the different displays. We had an illustrious good time.

A few of the highlights:

(Bizarre. But cool.)

(Kids riding bicycles to light up the tubes around the trees.)

(When not busy blogging, I am an art installation, based on my time in a neo-futurist Russian prison)

(Museum of Contemporary Art. May I explain that it is usually a normal color).

(I think this artist played a lot of Lite Brite when he/she was a kid.)

(Customs House illuminated. I am enamored with these light displays on buildings that are all the rage here).

(More Customs House. I'll spare you the 50 or so more photos I took).

(Except for this one because, seriously, look how wild this is - cracked building. The building "crumbled" a second later).

In the "best for last" category ... the lighting of the sails at the Opera House. There must have been at least a dozen or more motifs rotated (some more photogenic than others). It's hard to capture the experience because part of the fun is the way that the lights move and evolve, but here is at least a taste.

On the ferry on way home, I was happy to see that even the wharf got in on the luminescent action. More! Lights!