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Sydney continues to please us enormously. A couple of weeks ago while taking a walk over to the famous area of town called "The Rocks", we came across a Scottish festival in the large city center park called, what else, Hyde Park. The festival had exhibits of swordplay, traditional Scottish dancing, including sword dances, food stalls offering haggis, and a massing of the pipe bands. If you had asked us we would have guessed that maybe there were one or two such bands around, but the festival managed to attract something like a dozen, most of them based on clan associations and all wearing their clan tartan. Band members were aged from seven to seventy and beyond, men and women, thin and fat, old and young. What a demonstration of the strength of Scottish culture in Sydney. The presiding "laird" was also kitted out in kilt and sporran and leaning on a very Scottish-looking crook.

Marching Pipe Band

Traditional Costumed Dancers

Marching Pipe Band

The Pipes the Pipes are Playing!

Australo-Scottish Delicacies - Sausage, Haggis, chopped onions

Police Team on Horses

Australian-Cambodia Partners at their craft stand

It is hard not to conclude that Australia is still very much anchored in its British past with so many parks, streets, towns and so on named after British counterparts and a parliament that looks like a replica of the Westminster version, statues of Victoria and Albert adorning its largest city, and an ingrained sense of Anglo-Saxon fair play — cricket rivalries notwithstanding. But take a closer look and you see that much like the Britain of today, Australia is increasingly a multi-ethnic society. Out on the streets of the city, you are as likely to meet an Iranian as an Irishman, a Swede as a Scot and so on. Russians seem to be big in the taxi industry, Indians in the hotel industry. Yesterday while out on our bikes (more later) we asked directions several times and not once did we hear a true-blue Aussie accent in answer to our question.