10 Days in Sydney, Australia

[J.] We arrived in Sydney on Thursday, 3^rd of March 2016 in the late morning.
Our usual routine on arrival at the airport of new destinations generally includes the following: Withdrawing cash, getting a new SIM card including some data volume, sorting out the transport to our accommodation and doing some basic grocery shopping. 

 

After testing various hotspot set-ups over the past weeks, we changed the approach in Sydney by buying a cheap mobile phone that we are using as a mobile hotspot via tethering. This allows us to set up a local phone number and connecting all our devices to the internet at the same time. Technically, we could have used my LG G4 mobile phone for this as well, but we are still maintaining an old SIM card for various other tasks and hence, did not want to disconnect this SIM card from this phone. We tested this new set-up a lot while running around in Sydney and so far, it pretty much worked out.

We choose to stay in the suburb Newtown, which is close enough to all the main touristy attractions.

Husband in Newtown, Sydney

Newtown has a lovely charming atmosphere due to the old, small houses we immediately fell in love with. Every time I was wondering through its streets, it reminded me so much of our previous home in Melville, Johannesburg although the house style is slightly different. But certainly, the older building style with its love to details made the link for me and so often I just daydreamed of having a home in this suburb.

House in Newtown, Sydney

The AirB&B flat we stayed at was very close to a bigger shopping centre and I could not believe what I discovered there: an ALDI store! I love ALDI, a basic grocery store that has all the basic food ingredients you need and each item only comes in one or two different versions, so shopping is quick as for example, one does not need to compare 20 different sugar brands, sizes and prices but instead just grabbing the one sugar pack available. And the prices are generally cheaper compared to other grocery stores. Roaming the aisles and finding similar items organised in the same way I was used to back in Germany, made the shopping tours a lot of fun. Needless to say, that our appetite for known things we have not had in a long time made us buy ingredients and food in masses just because we lusted for them, like cheese (goats cheese, strong smelly cheese, blue cheese, oh my word!), Knoppers (chocolate waffle kind of snack for kids; one day I ate this for breakfast, lunch and dinner), cold cuts, tortellini, and so on…


We started our journey through this city fairly slowly by joining a free guided city tour (www.imfree.com.au) two days after our arrival and which was really good, with a lot of detail and which gave us a first solid overview of main buildings, history and locations.

Sydney Harbour

Forgotten Songs, Angel Place, Sydney

Of course, we added all the classical must-see sites over the next days in more detail.

We watched ‘La Boheme’ in the famous opera house, my first opera ever. It also gave me huge dressing challenges as I had an appropriate black dress, but only two pair of shoes with me: Flip-flops and track running shoes (well, I leave my final outfit to your imagination…). The hike along part of the east coast, the Bondi to Coogee Walk (http://bonditocoogeewalk.com.au), is indeed an awesomely scenic walk.

The price adjustment we had to go through coming from cheaper Asian countries was quite intense. Of course, we knew about it but actually feeling its impact on a daily basis as if it would drill holes in our purses is as always another story.
One afternoon, we went to a pub to have two beers and some light refreshments and left 50 Australian Dollars there. Doooh! As a result, husband made intense use of the kitchen we had at our accommodation and which pretty much worked out, price-wise and for husbands urge to do some serious cooking.

Crispy beetroot and ocean trout roe, Marque

However, this did not prevent us from going out one afternoon having a really great lunch at the Marque (https://marquerestaurant.com.au), a fantastic fine-dining restaurant. We opted for the full tasting menu which came with a wine pairing as well as a tea pairing. I have never had the latter and it really worked with the various courses, an absolutely great option! We had a blast with the various courses and the staff from the restaurant, leaving us fairly tipsy and walking home much earlier that day with properly full bellies than we intended to.

Caramelized plum with eucalyptus and licorice, Marque

Initially, we wanted to join a Friday night Magic: The Gathering tournament (to pimp our nerdy street cred), which is a duel card game, but given our wine-tired conditions we simply opted out.

Over the entire period of our stay, the weather was superb with sunshine and warm days around 30 degrees Celsius; some days were actually almost too hot to walk around, and particularly at night where it was hard to find some sleep.

After ten days of exploring, we found that Sydney is the Dave Grohl of all cities. Dave Grohl was the drummer of Nirvana, guitarist and singer of the Foo Fighters, apparently has a good sense of humour, is rich and famous and still quite down to earth. I have yet to meet someone who does not like the Foo Fighters or Dave Grohl. Well, Sydney is very much like that. It is a city, that makes it so easy for everyone to love it. In fact, it is pretty hard to find things that one does not like. Everything is clean and organised, signs and available information make it easy to find anything you need, buildings are pretty, the location itself with the beaches and the harbour could simply not be better.

Funnily enough, we had a few moments of us re-adjusting to the ‘first world’-rules after four months of travelling through Asia. Just few days before arriving in Sydney, I was crossing a busy street in Manila, Philippines in front of a traffic police officer while the traffic sign was signalling red without further consequences as car drivers seem to much more look out for other traffic participants and driving a bit slower. In Sydney, I crossed a small street just five meters away from a pedestrian crossing overlooking a car, who’s driver consequently had to hit the brakes and slow down because of me (overall however, not a really dangerous situation) which earned me a pretty angry head shake by the lady behind the steering wheel. On another day, I was taking some pictures while we were waiting for a train. A station officer was approaching me a few moments later educating me for several minutes about the dangers of shooting so close to the tracks and mentioning in a by-sentence about the maybe necessity of obtaining a permit before taking pictures. Bleeh.

In the meantime…

1) We are currently enjoying the North Island of New Zealand, driving around in our rented (normal) car which has a seventies kind of interior style. Love it and gives me a proper road trip feeling. It even smells like being 30 years old…

2) Buenos Aires, we cannot wait to see you; our flight and accommodation is confirmed! And we are going to be back at school, half-day Spanish lessons are awaiting us for entire four weeks’ of time. Boohoooo!

Ingress, or how to waste time...

[J.] At some time during our travels we discovered Ingress. Ingress is a reality multiplayer online location-based game, that one can play using an android device featuring location detection while having internet access. Players act as agents for either one of the two teams: the Enlightened or the Resistance. There is a lot of online information available about this game (just google it), but the basic idea is to capture and hold 'portals'. Portals are linked to real-life locations, which are generally buildings or art/sculptures.

Husband playing Ingress in Taiwan showing the typical body posture

Although the overall difficulty of this game is fairly easy, it has some sort of addictiveness to it. One ends up chasing one portal after the other, gaining more and more action points which ultimately levels an agent up, gaining access to more powerful items to be utilised during the game. And whenever someone has some time on its hands or is walking or driving around using public transport, it simply kills time. If you are really into it, it also gets you out into fresh air, when you have to defend your portals, link them or capture enemy portals.

I figured it to be a nice way to discover the neighbourhood of where ever we are staying for longer than just a few days. While hacking/capturing those portals that are close-by, I walk along streets I otherwise would not walk along and sometimes discover lovely stores, restaurants or just a pretty place I would have missed otherwise.

So, watch out for agent Dr Freiluft, part of the Enlightened fraction! :)

Trip recap after four months... the energy is back!

[J.] The last blog post was a lot about the challenges we were facing while being on the road for two months at that time. The original idea of this blog was to write about our travel adventures, the lovely places we visit and sharing moments we are enjoying so much. But so far, we have not shared much about Sri Lanka, Taiwan, the Philippines and now Sydney. And already, two more months have passed since the last post and consequently, so much more to write about... This list of places and moments to write about is really getting long and longer!

But... things have changed and I am smiling while typing this: The energy is back! :)
So, what has changed?

While being in Taiwan, and after putting a few changes into action around our travels as mentioned in the last post, we experienced a short period of time where our mood was indeed getting better and we started to relax more. However, something was still not working out and we could not really grasp it at the time when we arrived in the Philippines by mid of February 2016.
We knew, we only had about 2.5 weeks of time in the Philippines before moving on to Sydney, Australia (which was only planned as a short 10 day interim stop-over) and further to Auckland, New Zealand (where we wanted to travel for some time before finally making our way to Argentina). So, arriving in the Philippines, we immediately started to research accommodations, flights and possible itineraries for these places. And it turned out to be no fun. For years, I wanted to see and travel through New Zealand and in my mind, it has always been stunning. And then, the pure thought of having to do the planning for this New Zealand trip felt like too much. I just had no energy. I did not wanted to research anything, I did not wanted to read anything and I did not wanted to do anything. And husband felt the same... So weird.
And overall, so frustrating. I started to doubt all people who were telling us this year is going to be amazing. It simply did not feel like it! I started to accuse everyone having done something similar and having said that it had been the best time in their lifes hiding bad days they must have had as well in their stories and not telling the full truth. I just did not understand what was going on and why this trip so far on an overall level did not feel even close to being amazing...

The only reason that we could come up with at that time was that maybe, because we always knew that ultimately we wanted to visit Argentina, we may have considered all other countries on our way there only as being interim travel stages and for that reason, we could not fully enjoy them. Does not sound too reasonable, but that was all we could come up with. As a result, we cancelled the trip in New Zealand and booked a flight to Buenos Aires with only a 2 day stop in Auckland (because we already had the flight from Sydney to Auckland booked and confirmed).

Husband and Friend, White Beach, Puerto Galera, Philippines

With no more planning that needed to be done for the next 2.5 weeks, we had the most lazy days in months. There were a lot of days, were the only must-do of the day was the grocery shopping tour to the nearby market for dinner. Some days, I did not leave the surroundings of our apartment at all and just managed to walk to the beach directly in front of our small flat (10m max.) to have a dip in the water. I read a lot and we played a German card game (Skat) with husbands' friend who joined us during our time in the Philippines for hours and hours. That was it. No travelling around, no big day trips to nearby touristy places, no sight-seeing, no nothing. Just doing nothing...

At a later stage, I realised that this was the first 'true' holiday we had for more than a year, with nothing to worry about and really recharging our empty batteries. We were just enjoying quiet days, the sun and the constant sound of breaking waves.
Before we started this trip, someone mentioned to me that I had nothing to worry about as I am going to be on a one year holiday. I remember, that I responded that I do not believe such a trip to be a pure holiday, but only now I am sure that I was right about it. Travelling on a longer than 'normal' time scale is exhausting if you are not used to it. It takes time to adjust to constantly being on the move. It takes time to adjust to not having a home, not having your social network, family and friends around you, living out of a backpack, constantly moving out of the comfort zone and adapt to new cultures and places. In theory, we of course knew about it but really experiencing it seems such a different story. Even our bodies are still reminding us of this: I am currently fighting the fourth flu in four months and husband's stomach is more complaining than having happy times.

After such lazy two weeks, our energy was back. Only during the days in the Philippines, I realized how tired I really was, from the stress and sadness of leaving South Africa, from being not well prepared for the trip, from travelling too quickly. After two lazy weeks, we were walking down the streets in Manila on the last day before we left for Sydney and just enjoyed it. The thought of going to Sydney made me jump up and down, singing yeah-yeah-yeah! Nothing bothered me any more, all was cool, I had myself back and it felt so, so good.

Only now, after four months have past we feel like this trip is going to be awesome. And I know it will be. Only now, I am waking up every day and cannot believe how lucky we are that we have the opportunity to travel. That we are in Sydney, baby!
It took us a few months and some truly lazy days to finally adjust and getting the spirits back.

In addition, we got unbelievable lucky. Feeling like the old me again, I thought about what a mistake we made in deciding to skip New Zealand on our way to South America. But... Ta-taaaah! - Turned out that the flight we booked to Buenos Aires two weeks earlier never got through. For whatever reason, we had no confirmed flight! We never paid for it... So.... New Zealand! You are back on our list and we are coming :)



In the meantime...
1) Update on our electronic travel bug hitting us severely again:
My nine months old mobile phone stopped working the moment we arrived in the Philippines. It underwent a motherboard operation in Sydney and has recovered - while my purse has not yet.
2) I signed up for an online photography course and love it! But leading lines in the composition of a picture tend to hide from my eyes. Sneaky :)
3) I am committing myself to write one post a week. Boom!