Back to Australia

Just a couple of weeks ago I flew to Sydney for my sister's wedding. This was my first time visiting her there (the pandemic kinda got in the way), and my second visit to Australia and Sydney, the first being back in 2012. That time I only had a couple of nights in Sydney and didn't get to see much, but this time, apart from family stuff, I had about 10 days to rove around the sights and see what I'd been missing.

Circular Quay at night

As a prelude, I once again sprang for a business class upgrade for the flight over, so I got to travel in style. I reasoned that, with my departure time at 11.50pm and a flight time of 14.5 hours, I really needed to be able to sleep. I'll say my thinking was spot-on - I stayed up long enough for dinner (a caprese and chicken coconut curry with noodles, plus dessert) but ended up dozing for most of the trip. This meant that when I landed at 9am local time, I was reasonably well-rested and able to hang out with my sisters for the rest of the day. Indeed, I'd say that I was blissfully free of jet lag for the rest of the trip, so... result?

Fancy dinner and legroom

The other big difference from my previous trip is where I stayed. In 2012 I was paranoid about catching my onward flight to Cairns, so I ended up staying in an Ibis Hotel near the airport, but this time I stayed in a place near my sister's flat. It turned out to be a great location: about 20 minutes' walk to hers, and five minutes to Green Square train station, which I used to get into town most days. There was also a little shopping precinct nearby, with cafes, restaurants and a supermarket (one of the restaurants was, of all things, a Taco Bell).

With the extra days compared to 2012, I had a lot more time to see the sights and to just walk around. There was some stuff that my sister scheduled, like going to see local A-League side Sydney FC play against Central Coast Mariners, but otherwise I was able to hop trains into town pretty much whenever I wanted.

My first evening at liberty in town was actually Easter Sunday, when I went looking for Chinatown. I don't think I found the "real" Chinatown, i.e. the place with Chinese gates, but I walked along a number of streets that had all the Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai restaurants you could ever want. I also spent A$20 in an arcade, where I also got to enjoy a dance battle on Dance Dance Revolution, which is always a treat. I was tempted to try out a karaoke booth, but that felt a little too Aggretsuko (and about 75% of the songs were in Korean anyway).

They seem to be really strict about PDA

I made a couple of stops at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, enjoying the galleries devoted to modern Australian art and the ones for paintings by European artists from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I also took a morning to finally check out the Australian Museum, which I'd missed by minutes 12 years before. It was, as Bill Bryson writes in In a Sunburned Country, delightfully old-school, with room after room of stuffed animals and exhibits relating - sometimes in tangential ways, like the Irish elk skeleton - to Australia.

One morning was also spent at the Rocks, on the opposite side of Circular Quay from the Opera House. I caught the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Rocks Discovery Museum, as well as the Sydney Museum, which sits on the site of the first Government House. I'd have liked to check out the Police and Crime Museum, which is just up from the Quay, but it was closed until 13 April.

The rest of the time I was wandering around, looking for bookstores and nice places to eat. As to the former, Dymock's was reassuringly similar to Waterstone's, and I bought a couple of things there, though my favorite bookstore in Sydney is the Kinokuniya, pretty much for its enormous and well-appointed graphic novel section. I don't know what bookstore culture is like in Sydney generally, though it sounds like there are plenty of literary events and festivals; but the Kinokuniya was marvelous and I regretted not having more space to drag back a cartload of books from there.

As to places to eat, those are also varied and excellent in Sydney. I mentioned Chinatown, which had plenty of good places, but I also had loads of great Japanese, Thai and Chinese throughout my trip. The sushi was pretty much all high-quality - not as life-changing as in Tokyo, but invariably fresh and delicious. I even made it out to the Fish Market one day, where I sampled some tuna nigiri straight from the day's catch.

Another highlight was a family dinner at an RSL (Retired Servicemen's League), which maybe conforms most closely here to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Halls, but was actually quite different. It was like a combination of decent gastropub with casino attached, and the food and beer were nothing flashy but all went down nicely. To get in you need to register as a guest member, but apparently it's all a formality.

It struck me as I walked around the place that Australia is one of those countries that's made a place for itself in my heart, much like the US, the UK, Italy and Germany. I've never lived there, as I have in those others, but I could entirely see myself moving there... or I could, if it wasn't so damn far from everything else. Still, apart from the high house prices, it seems like a great, comfortable place to live, and I'd love to spend more time there. Indeed, in my last post about it in 2013, I talked about how great it would be to rent a flat there for a month and just enjoy it, and damn if that doesn't still sound like an amazing idea.

Now that my sister is married and settled on her partner visa, I was asking if I could use her as a reference to move there myself, but apparently my other sister has dibs on that. In any case, watch this space - maybe I'll meet an attractive Australian lady and get to move there with her?