Sydney 2010

Following the amazing Dubai, landing in Sydney is a world apart. As soon as you arrive in Sydney you are welcomed by the easy and outgoing nature of this nation. Once through customs a warm and humid air along with everyone in flip flops, colourful shirts reminds you of one thing alone: Summer!

Even thought the city is expensive the nice feeling you get when talking to people make up for that. Their double decked metro takes you straight into the city centre, where life is good. Indeed we were lucky as at the airport some Nordic tourists ready to leave gave us their still valid metro tickets. We saved 119 dollars, not bad to start our journey in Australia! After a tasty coffee and a nice chit chat with a very friendly waiter we were ready to discover Sydney on foot. The starting point for most tourists is the Rocks. Once the roughest part of the city as it was the main landing point for Convicts from the UK, now this part of the city is turned into the heart of Sydney Harbour particularly famous for its cafes, museums, restaurants and shops engraved in a maze of narrow streets. Circular Quay in my opinion is the best place to be! Picture this: the shining Sydney Bridge on your left and the modern Sydney Opera House on your right, the sun reflected on the harbour with the faint sound of snap happy tourists and children laughing and playing in the near by park.

To capture the essence of the city waking up and to get a different perspective of the lifestyle that Sydney has to offer, we went for a morning jog along the harbour wharfs through the Marina, under the Sydney Bridge around the city. This city can only be described as overwhelming.

The Hyde Park Barracks Museum now considered a World Heritage is a great place to see how Sydney came to be the city that we know today. Its history is relatively recent and tough, often haunted by human pain. In a nutshell here is how modern Australia was born: being a British colony, Ozzie land was used for storing convicts for which the UK had no longer any space for. The advantage for the British was to free the prisons and to use cheap labour to build the infra-structures that still exist today. The Hyde Park Barracks was the main sleeping/working quarters for these convicts in Sydney. Later on the Barracks hosted Irish orphans (mainly female) as Ireland was struck by several bad years of agriculture. This helped boost the Australian population which had become predominately male. Not that different that from what happened on the Eastern Coast of the US.

Knowing this it becomes very clear why personally I think that today Sydney is very similar to New York in many aspects: the modern architectural style and the dominant multicultural diversity go along with the friendliness and the energy you feel when walking down town. And then again the TV channels, the concept of distance, the European emigration patterns, the currency and the pursuit of a good life style… all of this reminds me of a young New York.

Gareth