Thursday, May 9, 2013

RTW Trip: Day 70-72 (5/4-5/6) - Sydney



Day 70-72: Extended, Family (or the Marginal Information Mined from Two Quieter Days in Sydney)



The last two days were spent mostly with members of my extended family that reside in Sydney. In lieu of boring you with Menezes and Pinto family stories, I quickly saunter through the non-family-related events of the past two days:

= Sydney is quite a nice city to just walk around in, which is what I did after I awoke around noon on Saturday. It is a very urban city with large buildings and broad streets, but tucked away are little parks, churches and reminders of a Sydney left behind years and years ago.

= Sydney also has some nice bars and pubs littered throughout the city. The only one I went to during my walk through Sydney was the Three Wise Monkeys, an Irish style pub located on some street near the central part of the Sydney CBD. They had a large selection of beers on tap, which seems to be pretty standard in Sydney, or Australia in general.

= Sydney’s main CBD is its heart and soul, but the outer areas of Sydney are large enough and busy enough that I still felt I was in a large city. I had a dinner in the Northern part of Sydney (across the Harbor Bridge), and the area outside the St. Leonard’s Street metro station was basically what Hoboken is to NYC, which is not a bad thing.

= The beaches around Sydney may take some time to get to during rush hour, but they are worth it. I went to Bondi beach on my way to the airport on Monday, and while it was off season, and a little overcast, the beach still looked about as perfect as any beach could. Sydney’s scenery in the outer areas are quite stunning. Those cities also reminded me of coastal Californian cities, with their open air bistros lining the street above the pristine sand and gorgeous blue waves.

= Balmain has a lot of pubs. A lot. There are about 70 pubs in that one district. Somehow, they all do pretty well, and while I went to a few on a Sunday night, there was a decent crowd around. There are pubs for everyone in this area. Some with music, some with grand architecture, some with outdoor patios, some with views of the East Harbor.

= I don’t know why Melbourne’s Avalon airport exists. It is some barren airfield located 50 km away from the city, that basically services about six flights a day (which puts it level with Dalat’s airport). Only Jetstar currently uses it for commercial flight (Qantas was using it for maintenance), and it’s terminal building makes Bangalore’s old airport seem too luxurious. I understand why budget airlines flock to secondary airports, but the usual advantage of these is their proximity to the city, not their complete isolation. Within two km from leaving Avalon airport, I felt totally lost amidst some farmland, with nary a wave of light from the airport we had just left behind.

= Overall, spend more time in Sydney, not less. When I first found out that my Tuesday reef diving tour in Cairns was cancelled, I quickly did some accounting to see if I would be better off not going to Cairns and staying two extra days in Melbourne. Looking back, I would have picked those two extras days in Sydney instead (although not even the crooked accountants on Wall Street could have legitimized that switch). My one regret from my time in Sydney isn’t a real one, but that I didn’t really get to experience too many of Sydney’s restaurants, because my restaurants were either at the homes of family, in expensive tourist destinations (harbor cruise, Sydney Tower) or in chain restaurants trying to make up for the high price of the meals at the tourist destinations. Still, I enjoyed my time in Sydney far more than I expected.

= More about that, my expectations in Sydney were lessened more from ignorance. I didn’t really know what to expect, and I was blown away. It is a modern city that would not be lost in any country in the world. It will definitely have a spot in my updated Top 20 Cities list that I do when I return to India in three weeks.

About Me

I am a man who will go by the moniker dmstorm22, or StormyD, but not really StormyD. I'll talk about sports, mainly football, sometimes TV, sometimes other random things, sometimes even bring out some lists (a lot, lot, lot of lists). Enjoy.