Sydney baby!!

I am in Sydney this weekend for the inaugural Historical Novel Society Australia conference, and I have to say I am excited to be here! I have long looked at the HNS conferences that have been held in the US and the UK and wished I could be there and finally it is our turn. Not to mention the fact that I have been doing lots of drives to the airport to drop other people off and pick them up but finally it is my chance to get on a plane and go somewhere!

My friend and I flew up on Friday morning and so we got to do some touristy stuff which was fun and then there was the opening reception tonight. I am not sure I am going to write a whole lot about the conference but I thought I would share a few photos over the next couple of days.

I will start with a bonus in relation to the weight loss I have been talking about recently. Today, I was able to get on the plane and not feel self conscious at all about being too fat for the person that I am sitting next to, or about something as simple as doing up the seatbelt. On previous journeys I have either had to really struggle hard to get the seatbelt done up or even just hide the seatbelt clip under my clothes and pretend that it was done up as the flight attendants walked through the plane. The other day I was talking to my beauty therapist about the fact that you are always thinking about your weight when you are overweight and this is a classic example. I was so excited by how easy it was to do it up that I even took a photo which just looks odd but what the heck, I am sharing it here anyway.

Once we checked in to our hotel, we spent the afternoon doing the tourist thing. I said to my friend that I am travelling with that I wanted to just hang out at Circular Quay, and she was initially not keen. In the end that is basically what we ended up doing but not before we spent some time walking through the gorgeous Queen Victoria Building here in Sydney.

Firstly, here's the view from the top of our hotel, which was built in the late 60s and you can quite honestly tell. Accommodation in Sydney is so expensive, so whilst it would be great to have a gorgeous hotel room, who can afford that!!

The QV building is now a shopping centre and it is gorgeous. We could quite easily have spent a lot of time looking at some of the more interesting shops, and maybe having some coffee and cake and just appreciating the interior, especially one of the clocks

We walked to the Opera House and then back around so that we were standing under the bridge looking back towards the Opera House. Of course, that means that there are plenty of the quintessential Sydney photos, although I am looking very windswept because it was windy.

And to give you some idea of exactly how windy it was....

Tonight was the first session for the conference and very dignified it was too. Champagne, some delicious finger foods, more champagne, a welcome address by Kate Forsyth and an opening address by Sophie Masson, a book launch for Felicity Pulman and then a discussion panel whose topic was ‘What can historical novelists and historians learn from each other?’.

And now, time to sleep before another big day tomorrow!! Before that though. Did you notice? I almost talked about bookish type stuff in this post!! Go me!