Oh Sydney!

Friday March 12, 2010

I’m posting this on Saturday because I couldn’t figure out how to access the Internet in our Sydney hotel room until today. So, I will recap the flight from Honolulu and try to catch up on the past 48 hours. The Qantas flight went pretty darn well, considering we were trapped in middle seats (on a wide-body jet) for ten hours. The Q people are smart—they feed you and feed you while distracting you with movie after movie (four in all). It’s a good thing we’re not big movie fans. I hadn’t seen any of the movies but I’m sure 99% of the rest of the world has. They were: Couple’s Retreat, Julie and Julia, The Invention of Lying, and Sherlock Holmes. I watched all but SH since my eyes were bleeding by the time we got to that one. And, again, the Q people are smart because you get two full meals (and not bad food, either) along with free wine, “spirits” and ice cream for dessert. Crossing the International Dateline is amusing. You simply stop saying “Wednesday” and start saying “Thursday”—just like that. No fuss, and very little jet lag involved.

We arrived in Sydney at about six p.m. and caught the shuttle to our hotel (we’re becoming rather adept at catching shuttles) and then just went to bed at about eight. Even though we were well entertained on the flight over, ten hours in a cramped seat takes a toll.

On Friday we got up and looked around our area. Wow! Our hotel is in the perfect place—Darling Harbor. And “darling” it is, with restaurants, bars, and our hotel room has a gorgeous view. We’ve inadvertently landed in “hip-ville” without even trying. We got this hotel on the Internet and had no idea what to expect. One the one hand, we’ve figured out this is an expensive area (five bucks for a yogurt? Really?) but we could stand to lose a few pounds so no biggie. We ate breakfast at a harborside restaurant that boasted a “$7 Breakfast Special” (the cheapest thing we’d seen so far) and we ambled in. The waiter came over and said something that sounded like, “Wid a spetchel you ged flah why coffee. Thad okay?” We stared at him uncomprehendingly. “Sorry?” we asked. Need I tell you he repeated the exact same thing he said before, at the same tempo. We looked at each other and did a little “tourist shrug” the worldwide gesture meaning “We have no idea what the h*ll you just said.” He (being used to tourists in this part of the city) slowed down his speech and said, “White coffee? You know that?” We gave him a tentative smile. “Like a latte? You know the word ‘latte’?” Well duh, we thought, we’re from the Pacific Northwest. We practically invented the latte (although we gave it an Italian name to make it seem more cool than calling it ‘milky strong coffee.’

Anyway, from there we took a sightseeing bus (one of the great things about being of retirement age is you have no need to pretend you’re not a tourist) and we went completely around the city of Sydney. We got off at “The Rocks”—another way-hip part of town (okay, so we’re old, but we’re not dead. We like seeing the hip stuff) where we ate at a local street fair and Tom bought a hat because the wind on the double-decker bus (see above where I mention we don’t mind acting like tourists) was pretty fierce. For dinner we bought pear hard cider and a chicken/mushroom pie for me and a craft multi-grain (we’ve heard it’s good to eat multi-grains) beer and a lamb/rosemary pot pie for Tom. We watched the lights go on in the harbor as we ate on our balcony. It was tres, tres chic even if we say so ourselves.

I’m adding some pics we took on the bus tour. The Sydney Harbour Bridge (kind of over-amped, we think. It’s a big old steel superstructure bridge. We weren’t that impressed) and the Opera House (way beyond expectation. Really gorgeous and much, much larger than we imagined.) We loved the entire city. It’s quaint and cosmopolitan at the same time. And it’s clean and seemingly very prosperous. It’s expensive, but we found out the minimum wage is over $14/hour so the locals can afford it. The unemployment rate is only 5.2% (half that of the U.S.) In other words, they are doing something right—or maybe everything right. We love it here. If we were forty years younger we’d be looking into immigrating!