Exploring Sydney

Sydney, Australia

7th September 2004

It was a bit of a surreal experience waking up in Sydney. After being denied my trip here a year before I never quite thought I would make it back again. I found my surroundings quite dirty and bohemian but I got used to it after a while. I had been woken only twice during my sleep. Once by two Germans moving out of the room and a second time by a guy coming to look at the hostel and was curious as to what the rooms looked like.

Once I had woken and showered, I headed to the rooftop of the hostel to see what the day was like. I was hoping that it was going to be sunny and lovely everyday as the last time I was here it rained half the time but there was no such luck. It was raining. I was a bit shocked and depressed that I would have to explore this amazing city again in the rain. I ran around kings cross for about 5 minutes before I came across a shop selling umbrellas.

I set out towards Farm Cove and the Opera House. It felt quite weird when I got there. It did not have that same magic that I had felt being there in 2001. Perhaps it was the rain and the grey sky, I do not know but I could not quite marvel at it until the sky had cleared and the sun was shining down.

I then had some lunch in a food court next to Circular Quay. There were lots to choose from but I could not help feeling that I was paying London prices for everything. I guess this is to be expected in such a tourist-ridden area. Another thing I had noticed is that all the bins were sealed in order to stop people putting bombs into them. Not that I ever clean up after myself in a food court anyway.

After eating a plate of fish and chips, I bought some batteries and continued to walk around Sydney for the rest of the afternoon.

It was so nice to look at the photos I had taken when I got back to the hostel. Photographs and these bloggs are all that I will have to remember of my journeys. There isn't a chance that I could remember this much detail but the photos will never change.

One thing I do miss when on holidays is internet access that it readily available and predictable. I have my PC at work, which had been mine for the past 6 months. There are no surprises when I use it and the internet has been extremely reliable the entire time. No one else uses my machine so I don't tend to worry about viruses, spyware or key loggers. When you use the internet on the road, you tend to be using older windows machines that are used constantly by god-knows-who. They are used by people who might go to sites that take advantage of older windows versions and install spyware. Unfortunately, I can't reformat every machine I use before I begin to work away on it so I need to be careful about changing passwords and not touching anything work related. Tie this is with the fact that I'm writing content and working with photographs that mean the world to me and it's the equivalent of having unprotected sex with a Malaysian Transvestite.

After getting my photographs backed up onto a CD, I headed off to Hungry Jacks to grab some dinner and then went back to the hostel. There was a movie called 9mm playing on the TVs in the kitchen / communal area. This film was really messed up and it didn't put me in a good mood to start the night.

I had to wait an age to use the phone in the hostel to call Anja but it was so nice once I got a hold of her. I guess I talk pretty loud because a lot of people laughed when they heard me say in my German border guard voice "Dreizehn kilo, von was?!?".

The nice thing about this hostel is that bar owners send people out during the day that will advertise their establishments to us and will offer us a free round if we go there to drink. Every weeknight except for Friday, we always got a free round of drinks, sometimes two, when we went out.

Around 9pm, 17 of us headed out to a bar. The only messed up thing about our group was that there were 14 guys and 3 girls. I'm married and I don't care to go on the pull anymore but I could feel their pain as these guys were desperately trying to make something of the slim pickings on offer. I know that these girls would be ignored had there been any more to choose from in the club that night. The other thing that was a bit weird is that Kings Cross wasn't busy at all during the week and that some nights we might be on the only ones in a bar for the first hour of so. The biggest laugh of the evening came from an Italian trying to pick up one of the Irish girls with the line "You have mussels of man".