Sydney – A True Cosmopolitan City

After three breathtaking days along the coast I finally reached in the evening a truly metropolitan city – Sydney. After intense traveling for work over the last years I have been seeing already quite a lot of amazing places like Tokyo, Paris, Shanghai, New York or London and I have no doubt that Sydney neatly fits in… or stands out, as you wish 🙂

After dropping off my flashy car close by to the airport I was pretty lucky to find a direct bus connection from across the street straight to Sydney’s coolest hostel, where I met a lot of travellers from all over the world. When I can’t get used to one thing in life then it is to sleep with 5 or more guys in a dorm. Even though rules are pretty straight forward… 1. Put your smelly cheese shoes into a plastic bag 2. Put that smelly plastic bag full of smelly cheese into your locker … there is always rule number 3 which outrules Number 1 and 2 most of the time: Whatever… I put my smelly cheese wherever I want and neither in a plastic bag nor in a locker. So, surprisingly what I found was the ideal breeding conditions for bacteria and fungi in a humid and smelly cheese room 😀

I did the only thing I could imagine to do in such a situation… I perfectly blended in, lol. At least we could organise a dehumidifier after a while to decrease the humidity in the room, but the smelly odour remained, haha.

Dhruv (a smart Indian guy with an actually funny name in German – it means “to be high”) and Mario (a great German fella who was gaining life experience in between jobs), Two of my room mates were inviting me to check out the light festival “Vivid” together with them. I had to give it a miss since I was just too exhausted from the road trip and was glad to fall asleep quite early just to wake up the next morning at 6 o’clock again. Someone forgot to switch off his damn mobile phone and it was entertaining the whole dorm for 5 minutes… until I realised it was actually mine, hahaha. Fu%&, I forgot to switch it off after my early start the day before. Of course, I did not have a flash light with me either which made it pretty difficult to figure out the number combination on my lock. Mario was awake in the meantime as well (as most likely all others of the dorm) and handed me over his torch of the mobile phone. Finally, I took my phone and killed the alarm. LOL! Great…. Everyone must have hated me at this point of time…

Anyways, since I was already awake I took the chance to experience a truly magical moment: the sunrise at the Sydney Opera House. I took the next metro to Circular Quay and was at Sydney’s main attraction 20 minutes later… While the beautiful shapes of the opera house were made by a master architect, the nature and morning sun gave it the last and final touch: the extraordinarily beautiful opera house at sunrise laying calm and quiet in the harbour, surrounded by another masterpiece of construction art: the Sydney harbour bride. I could not get enough of the scenery and was taking plenty of pictures while trying to get different angles of the superstars of Sydney while walking for hours up and down the harbour.

After I had no space anymore on my camera’s memory card I decided to move on and explored Circular Quay with its plenty of restaurants, mobile cafe trucks, bars and cool stone brick buildings which gave it a unique industrial charm. While listening to entertaining music I made my way up the harbour bridge where I climbed one of the bridge’s pillar to have a fantastic view over the construction of the bridge, the harbour and again… the beautiful Sydney Opera House. What an amazing day!

It should not be over yet… I met the two other folks back at the hostel where we caught the next public transport to Bondi beach in order to do a highly recommended cliff top walk to Coogee. Bondi is an amazingly beautiful beach with lots of restaurant and bars along the surfer’s paradise, highly recommended to have dinner or simply a couple of drinks with friends – what we both did at the end of the day ^^. However, until then we still had a couple of km to do and started our walk without losing too much time. Every corner had another beautiful beach and scenery to offer… What I already saw along the coastal highway between Melbourne and Sydney was here built by perfection… swimming pools just at the corner of the cliff, where waves were greeting a lonely swimmer in the pool. Simply gorgeous…

The next day I went together with my dream team to the Fish Market in Sydney, an absolutely cool place with plenty of seafood, fish and other specialities from the sea. The choice was just overwhelming!  The place was “surprisingly” crowded with Asians who were taking again pictures of themselves, together with their food… I especially loved the one with the sea urchin which you can find below in the picture gallery 😀 We went to the next wine shop and bought a bottle of white wine from New Zealand and enjoyed some glasses together with some freshly prepared seafood… delicious! 🙂

A bit tipsy I had to move on and said goodbye to Dhruv and Mario, making my way to my friends Sandra and Branko who I met a couple of month ago in Munich, where my best friend Sasa was getting married. Lovely memories… anyways… since I remembered that we were back then already pretty thirsty, I organised two bottles of red wine instead of one. I should have known better that even those two bottles were not enough for that evening 😀

Sandra and Branko as well as their two gorgeous young ladies, Sophia and Eva, welcomed me as another lost child (I had already two families in Australia). I felt in love with their modern apartment, the cool electronic music playing in the background and of course… the MEAT! While Branko was already firing up the BBQ on the terrace, he mentioned just casually to not drink more than a glass of wine, just for the taste. Yesterday apparently killed him while having a business dinner with some of his customers. Everyone who knows Branko knew that somehow it did not last with just this glass, lol. The wine just tasted extraordinarily delicious and we had to try of course also the other bottle of wine… and another bottle of wine… and another bottle of wine… LOL. At the end of the evening we did not only have an amazingly delicious dinner but also finished four bottles of wine. This is what I call an accomplishment 😀 Before I was leaving the party I also received a special gift which shall accompany me along my adventures for the next couple of month: Shiny Shoe. Shiny Shoe is an owl. The favourite animal of Eva. Just adorable… I was happy to have had such a great time in Australia, a perfect end for a truly gorgeous 2 week road trip adventure and met great friends along my way.

Life is full of surprises, you just need to let go and face the uncertainty with an open mind… great things will follow… Thank you “Down Under” and all who made it special! You were truly a surprise!

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