Wednesday Weirdness: Sydney's Chinese Garden

Sydney is a big, cosmopolitan city, and parts of the city are really very Asian. Our accommodation was on the edge of Chinatown, for instance, so our culinary experience of Sydney was overwhelmingly Chinese. (Not that either of us minded!)

But nowhere in Sydney is more ostentatiously Chinese than the Chinese Garden in Darling Harbour. The garden, built in the classic Ming style, was a gift to Sydney from her Chinese sister city, Guangzhou, which is a huge metropolis no one really notices because it's vaguely near Hong Kong if you draw China really small. The garden opened in 1988 with the goal of promoting cross-cultural friendship and understanding.

Where the heck are we . . . ?

China, did you pull something crazy again?

It's also as Chinese a Chinese garden as just about anything we saw in China. How's that for cognitive dissonance?