Australia Part 1 - Sydney Friends

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I wouldn't say that I've been reluctant to visit Australia. I'm not sure if it's an NZ thing, a global thing, or just a personality thing, but I feel that the more accessible a place is, the less likely that I've willing to plan a trip there. I mean, NZ is far enough from the world that any trip requires a robust plan, but in my head I've blurred the difference between a 3 hour flight to Australia, and a 28 hour flight to Europe. I think it's because I go down a slippery slope for these things. Ok so trip to Australia is this. For a little bit more time and money, I could just go to Asia. And for a little bit more, I can just go to Europe.. again. I think the biggest bit of inertia is deciding to leave our comfortable little Shire, but once you're out, going to Rivendell, Moria or Mordor don't seem like too much further.

As of writing this, my travel history is thus.


• Waikehe trips - 0
• South Island trips - 2
• Australia trips - 3
• Asia trips - 4
• Europe trips - 5



I mean, this is far from unusual. Travelling to Europe, I often find that I end up seeing way more of the continent and country than the locals there. It probably is a fairly universal mindset. What it does mean that when I do meet the odd German or Polish traveller in NZ, I can ask for tips on where to visit NZ based on their 3 week road trip, and also give them recommedations about cool towns and cities in Europe from my backpacking adventures. But yeah, this was my first every trip to Sydney Australia (Yes I've been to Sydney, Nova Scotia which was about 38 hours worth of transit). If I keep up my blog writing momentum, I'll explain why I ended up planing this trip so last minute. My impression of Sydney was not far off from how my NZ friends who've relocated there have described it. Big. Scale. More. And this was just in my 3 days there. I can imagine living there to give you a better appreciation, good and bad, about how big things are. More opportunities, more events, more people... but at the same time more travelling, more expenses, and more people. I had a few visits lined up, which was my main driver for visiting the city.



The first person that I ended up meeting was an ex-colleague/current friend named Guy, who is a Kiwi by heart, but Aussie by ambition. Guy and I bonded over a number of things, but primarily board games. Imagine how many board games a reasonable person might have. Then double it. Then add a 0. That might put you in the right ballpark (feel free to comment a guess). But more than that, he is an extremely social and generous being, who's devoted countless hours on his visits to NZ teaching and playing games with "The Co-operative Boardgame Society". He gave us a logo and some seed games, and I wrote the charter. I was glad to be able to catch up with Guy, and exchange some canned butter for an evening of drinks, food, and of course, boardgames at a local pub. I did manage to once conquer Hill 218, so I'd like to believe that he wasn't going too easy on me. As always, we were able to exchange life updates, and talk about future plans, but I'm definitely glad to get some objective and candid advice. I look forward to our next session in NZ.



Next I got to meet up with the infinitely charismatic Jordan. Jordan is a Roskill, AIESEC and university alumnus, which means we share a lot of commonality from a cultural and values point of view. He’s been doing excellently managing and operating Dale Carnegie in Sydney. Over the last few years has not-so- subtly been trying to convince us to move over, and I’m sure has probably turned a few Kiwis. One of my main reasons for visiting Sydney was to be able to catch up with Jordan, who’s been very sincere about his love for the city. A mutual friend of ours once said “it’s good that we can also make new memories, instead of just reminiscing about old ones”. It does hold true, that often you can just ‘catch up’ with old friends and share nothing in common but your past. I did was to make some effort “hanging out” rather than just “catching up”, so I was pleased to get a nice guided tour of Sydney as part of our meet up.




We managed to pack quite a few things in a day, which was probably the most intense of my time in Australia. After saying hello to some of his friendly employees at the DC office, we did a drive to a nice vantage point under the bridge, and had a great harbour view of the bridge as well as the opera house. I’m a bit of a sucker for harbourside views, so I was quite satisfied. We did a quick stop at Bondi Beach (albeit no swimming due to cold) before heading back to town. We did a good walking tour of the city centre, including Chinatown and Darling Harbour. Melissa joined us for a nice vegetarian dinner, where we cheersed over soy milk (with varying temperature/sweetness between us) and rediscovered trivia time over the QuizUp app. Hopefully by the time you read this, I’ll have beaten your high score Jordan. Alice joined us later.. Or rather, we spent a bit of time locating Alice (who apparently has a penchant for being geographically challenged), which allowed for a bit more city viewing. We then wandered over to the Harbour area where the Vivid light show was on. It was a bit absurdist in places, but was a cool way to experience the city at night. I even managed to touch the sail of the Sydney Opera House, which was a lot more tile-y than imagined.




While I was in Sydney, I was staying with Keshav and Sha. These are two of the nicest people you could hope to meet, and it was great to see how they were doing with their recent move to Sydney. Now I call Sha nice, but that doesn’t change the fact that she physically assaults you the more she gets to know you. I’ve been reluctantly edging this friendship forward, and am dreading our next meeting post our Sydney bonding. We spent a day working from home, which was a good way to hand out while still being productive. Highlights from the day included an unusual Japanese fusion brunch of Miso Mushroom Toast. and OmuRice. What’s the deal with Asian food and ketchup? Rice and ketchup is one of the most drunk-college foods I can imagine, but apart from that, it was actually a tasty meal. We also had a quick lunch time game of Jaipur, which she took to pretty quickly, and hopefully enjoyed. Welcome to the world of quirky boardgames.




Last, but not least, I caught up with Jenny and some others for a night on the town. The night started out quite entertainingly, because Yulin didn’t know I was joining. When I jumped out from behind the door to say hullo, it was the closest to a cartoonish double-take that I’ve seen in real life. Hopefully it was a positive shock rather than anything else. Our night out was mainly at a silent disco at one of the best vantage points in the city; the Sydney Tower (which incidentally is a pretty ugly structure alone, but is nice up the top because you can see the city and not the tower). Vivid was still on, so we had panorama views of the city lit up at night. This was my first silent disco, and was a lot less weird than I thought it would be. The headsets were pretty good, and you have three music channels, each of which would light up the headset in a different colour. There an interesting mixture of peer pressure to get people onto the same channel as you, so that you can groove in synchrony, but also just zoning out to a song that you in particular enjoy and bonding with randoms who are the same colour as you (metaphor for racism??? To be discussed).




All in all, my Sydney experience was very wholesome. I enjoy travelling for the people, and was grateful to have so many hosts and tour guides and companions during my brief stint. Amongst a few odd things that I found was that Sydney does distinguish itself from Auckland/Melbourne a fair bit, mainly in terms of people culture. People out and about seemed a lot more conscious about lifestyle and aesthetics. The amount of plastic or lack of plastic alternatives did stand out to me, especially compared to Auckland, and recent visits to San Francisco and Melbourne (which, admittedly and pretty hippy cities).

The average eyelash length in Sydney is probably the longest that I’ve experience anywhere in the world. Also a surprising amount of topless men on the beach during a winter evening. People also work longer hours than I’d prefer, which on top of long travel distances would mean that time available might be sparse. In saying that, there seems to be absolutely no shortage of Things To Do. The number of different food and shopping places alone was overwhelming, and countless events and upcoming gigs and festivals. I’ll probably go back at some point, but this will be determined by how often I catch up with my friends there.



In saying that, big thanks to all that made my little trip into a big experience.

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