After almost 20 hours in a plane, in which I watched 3 movies read all the magazines around me and slept quite a while I arrived in Sydney. Everyone is very friendly, even the customs officer.
The subway is pretty much all you need to get anywhere, if it doesn't take you, the buses will.
In Kings Cross I found the hostel, Jolly Swagman, which was mentioned in the Lonely Planet to have an active social life, and surely did. Outside just about everyone staying there and in some hostels in the area, set around two tables and spent most of their time chatting, drinking and smoking their self rolled cigarettes; 25 pack of Malboro = $14.
There I met the most different people with the most amazing philosophies of life. Aidan, an Irish, who actually spoke Irish, a broken English that sounds like it has no spaces between the words. Only 500k people speak this dying language, mostly in the countryside, where he was from. He bought a van to travel around Australia, but could not make it out of Sydney.
A group of French guys and girls that were in the travel work program but could not find work.
My first impression of the hostel was amazing, I really got to see the different mentalities and different ways people take their travelling or vagabonding. Most are young and short in resources ($$$). Meanwhile some are cooking a feast of shrimp, scallops and fish, or couscous with filet mignon, others are eating Nutella out of the jar as a meal.
To many Sydney is a complex opera house and a bridge, however there is much more to it. Not to mention the Aussies.
The museums are amazing, not even close to the louvre in size but very informative. The Museum of Sydney explains parts of the history of Sydney and how it grew so rapidly into a booming economy. Australian Museum is mostly the natural history side of Australia, however there was an amazing exposition of pictures from Africa from an anthropologist called Robert Haas. |
