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Published: December 26th 2008
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Downtown Sydney
On Christmas Eve Christmas in Sydney; we’ve made it to the “Land Down Under”!
25th December 2008
Christmas Day! And we’re not having Vegemite sandwiches! We’re off to Coogee Beach for a Christmas picnic lunch with Sue and Eric (my cousin).
Arrived here on Tuesday evening 23rd December and guess what? It was RAINING, and only about 22 degrees. Maybe the unseasonable weather has followed us from New Zealand? Whatever, it was nice because we thought that it would be uncomfortably hot and humid, as indeed it was here earlier in the month, and it would have been like walking into an oven on landing. We now have time to acclimatise. We got to our hotel fairly rapidly from the airport (transport links are excellent in Sydney) to find that we are in a great buzzing location. We are on George Street in Chinatown, above a well-known and very smart restaurant called “Charlie Chan’s” and within walking distance of lots of the city sights and Darling Harbour. On Sue and Eric’s advice we purchased travel passes which cover bus, train and ferry routes all around the city. We dumped our rucksacks, had a quick shower and then stood in the rain
Iconic View!
The Sydney Opera House outside the hotel while they came and found us to go out to eat. Such a great first night this was a good start to our Sydney holiday.
Yesterday morning, Christmas Eve, we met up and spent our introductory day to the city, with Eric as our intrepid tour guide. We walked all over The Rocks and harbour area, with a few beer stops on the way. Got lunch in a nice old pub then boarded the Woolwich ferry to take in the harbour sites from the water. The Rocks is an old historical area, by the famous Harbour Bridge. It is a warren of tiny and hilly streets, full of renovated wharfs (now interesting boutiques and galleries) and dotted with nice Victorian pubs and little restaurants. It is literally built on rocks, like small dark sea cliffs which rise up from the harbour before becoming dwarfed by the modern high rise of the city centre above; and just across a small inlet of water, the Sydney Opera House sits majestically on its small peninsula and quite rightly, since it is such a stunning piece of architecture, dominates the bay. Sydney’s famous skyline is as good as it gets,
and of course the best way to see it is from the ferries on the water. A trip to Woolworths opposite the Queen Victoria Building (which is an amazing place) ensured that we bought food for our Christmas picnic lunch today, before going out last night. The QVB is a shopping mall. I don’t know of another in the world like it. It is splendidly Victorian and ornate, on three floors and covering a whole city block, it is very grand indeed. So the idea of shopping malls is nothing new and not invented by the Americans after all! In Victorian Sydney they had the Queen Vic back in the nineteenth century. It is rather like the Burlington Arcade in Regents Street magnified a dozen times. It is a sensational building. We ate out in Kings Cross, walked back home with slightly tired and aching feet and were back to the hotel about 1.30 a.m. George Street was absolutely heaving at this time, with thousands of people out on the streets celebrating Christmas. It was a great day to get orientated, enjoy the sites and feel our way around this most vibrant of cities.
Today was “Christmas on the
The old and the new
The Rocks and the Harbour Beach Day” and although it didn’t really feel like Christmas to us, despite the fact that many people wore Santa hats, even a police horse trotted along the promenade proudly sporting his red cap with white bobble and one couple had their Christmas tree proudly erected on the Coogee sands, it was a superb way to spend Christmas Day. The sun shone down, the ocean was blue and lovely for swimming; the four of us had such a good time! In the evening, phone calls home to England and Spain just finished our Christmas off a treat (we are now ten hours ahead of Spain, where the sun is also shining brightly today, and eleven hours ahead of the UK.
MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE! WE HOPE THAT YOUR DAY WAS AS GOOD AS OURS.
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