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!