Hello!
Paul and I embarked on our new life in Sydney July 28th. I am excited to share with you here instead of copying and pasting all my emails/texts back and forth to everyone. I will start at the beginning and hopefully catch up in the next week or two. I am also going to include fun links to things I am learning about to prep all of you for when you come visit. Warning, I plan to be generous in my use of all the new slang I am learning. Furthermore, as this progresses and I begin to write reports for work, my guess is that my spelling will gradually become more Australian.
Day 1
July 28th, 2017
There is something so special about discovering a city for the first time and knowing that the streets will eventually become familiar to you and it will become home. We had been staring at Google Maps and “wandering” around on streetview for so long, it was so nice to be immersed in the city and finally get to see the harbor. Oh the harbor! It sneaks into various views and seems to be around every corner. The city is spread out all around the harbor, mostly atop bluffs, which lends itself to stunning vistas and convenient ferry transport. The city is very connected to the water, with waterfront parks and beaches throughout the city and in small bays.
On our first day, we landed at 6am and could not check into our room yet, so we dropped our luggage and went to find some breakfast. We cruised up Kent Street past Paul’s new office and up to Barangaroo, a fairly new development area adjacent to the Central Business District, and grabbed some coffee. They aren’t lying when they say the coffee is better here! Apparently Starbucks made a big push to enter this market around 10 years ago and all but failed. There are a squillion cute cafes all over the place serving avocado toast and soy chai lattes. The soy milk here is much richer and more like regular milk, which has me over the moon.
We cruised around Barangaroo Reserve, which I recognized from all the times we have used it in Sasaki precedent images, and around to the Harbor Bridge and the Opera House. What an icon! I know I complain about design egos, but on this one, Jørn Utzon truly created something unique and inspiring.
For dinner, Karen, Paul’s mom’s dear dear friend, took us out to dinner at the iconic Icebergs restaurant in Bondi Beach. It is winter here now, so the beaches are a bit quieter than I am sure they will be, but it is nice to be able to get our bearings before the height of the tourist season. The seafood is wonderful, though it was a bit strange to ask what all the strange fish on the menu were. Karen is an absolute riot. She and Paul’s mom, Sarita, worked together at IBM in New York. She is from Brisbane, but has been in Sydney for the last 6 months and is really showing us the ropes here.
That’s it for now. I will forge ahead on some of our other, less jet-lagged adventures!


