Living it up with Mozart in Sydney

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We were very excited as our plane made its decent into Sydney as we got an excellent birds eye view over the city and saw our first glimpse of the famous harbour which is home to the Opera House and the harbour bridge. After landing we phoned up the hostel we had decided to stay in and waited for our pick up in to town. The hostel was called The Maze and it was right in the centre of the city. It turned out to be very impersonal and over-priced. Unlike South American hostels which were hardly ever full and offered free services such as internet, hostels in Australia have so many backpackers coming and going that the staff don't make any effort to help you and they charge for everything including sheets in some places!

We weren't going to let the hostel spoil our stay though and after checking in we went out to explore the streets and eat some cheap Sushi which was being sold everywhere. It was getting late by this time so we only explored the area close to our hostel and then went for some drinks and some cheap dinner at a backpacker bar. After our tea the bar started to get very busy, it filled up with lots of 18 year old lads all shouting and acting like baboons. We weren't happy with the clientèle so we left and found a nice bar round the corner with live acoustic music. I think we're getting old!

The next day we headed down the main shopping street, stopping along the way to window shop, towards the harbour to see the Opera House and the Bridge. The area around the harbour leading to the Opera House was very upmarket with lovely restaurants and fantastic views. It was incredible to see the Opera House in the 'flesh'. After seeing it on television and in books for years it was a little weird to see the world famous venue for real. It is an expressionist modern design, with a series of large precast concrete shells, forming the famous roofs of the structure. It's perhaps a bit uglier up close than pictures suggest but when admired from a distance it's a work of art. We went inside and contemplated doing a tour which takes you round the various rooms and gives you some history but we decided it would be much better to actually go and see a concert as it didn't work out to be that much more expensive. So we bought tickets for Motzarts Requiem performed by The Sydney Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir for Saturday night. Very exciting. The rest of the day we just wandered a bit more taking everything in. The buildings on the main streets of the CBD were an interesting mix of new and old with beautiful old architecture such as that of the town hall sitting alongside gleaming new skyscrapers.

The next day was Friday 31st October, Halloween, and we decided to get the ferry across to Manly Beach, one of Sydney's most famous beaches along with Bondi. The ferry ride was lovely and gave us more great views of the Opera House as it made its way right round it and across the harbour towards Manly. The beach was nice, but nothing compared to the beaches we'd seen in Brazil. It was very busy and the sea wasn't that warm as Sydney is qutie far South but we spent some time sunbathing for the first time in months. It was very strange to see children dressed in there Halloween costumes walking in the sunshine along the beach on their way to go trick or treating, it's usually dark and rainy in England.

That night we went out to Bondi Junction, an area of Sydney, to meet Lil's friend Nat who has moved over to live from England. We went to a couple of bars and had a few drinks before getting the bus back into the town centre. Before going back to our hostel we decided to go and have one more drink in an irish pub that stank of sick followed by a kebab, very British.

The following day we just killed time walking the streets until it was time to head to the Opera House for the concert. Although it wasn't a wasted day as we did manage to work out our plan for the rest of Australia, or rather someone worked it out for us. We went to enquire about trips at a tour agent and we got coerced into booking our Fraser Island and Whitsundays trip and also our Greyhound bus ticket which would entitle us to hop on and off the bus all the way to our final stop, Cairns. We don't really like having everything so planned but we figured that in Australia everyone does the same thing anyway so we might as well just go with the herd.

The time came for us to go to The Opera House for the concert, we were very excited. There was a wedding going on in one of the rooms and as we arrived the bride and groom were having their pictures taken on the stairs, a nice but pricey venue. Before the concert started we had a glass of champagne in the outside area, the sun was starting to set so the city was all lit up in the backround and looked stunning. We felt very out of place as everyone else were dressed in evening gowns and suits. The concert was in the main concert hall, the biggest room in the Opera House. It is an amazing room with near perfect acoustics, it holds 2600 people and it also houses the worlds biggest organ with 10,000 pipes. The lighting in the room was very regal and added the grandeur of the place. The atmosphere was electric which was surprising considering it was a classical performance and as the music started a silence fell over the crowd. The concert was phenomenal and the sound together with the musicianship of the performers was truly remarkable, a once in a lifetime experience and definitely the highlight of Sydney.

We spent another full day in Sydney just exploring and being 'cosmopolitan', we went to see the arty districts of Paddington and Kings Cross which are full of boutiques and cafes, not prosistutes like their namesakes in London, and the next day we took an over night bus to our next stop, Byron Bay.

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