Sydney is cool.
4 nights and 3 full days were definitely not enough! Circular Quay, the Opera House, the Sydney Harbor Bridge, the ferry to Manly, Manly beach, shopping, fun neighborhoods like Newtown, Darlinghurst, and the Rocks, Hyde Park, the Botanic Gardens, great food, great public transport….and that was just three days! Imagine what experiences there were to have with a little more time!
As noted on the Week 37 recap, our first day we tried hard not to go to sleep too early so after we checked into our AirBnb we got back on the train and headed to the Newtown neighborhood. Mix Boulder 20 years ago, South Broadway with its small independent stores, and tie it together with a big gay bow and you’ve got a sense of Newtown.
You can’t visit Sydney without at least one iconic landmark photo–and we may have gotten a few more than just one of the Sydney Opera House. The Opera house is amazing inside and out. Regrettably, we didn’t get to a performance inside, but we did take a tour with a lovely guide named…..wait for it……..Sheila.
Sheila took us up and down and all around showing us beautiful harbor views, the larger performance spaces and imparting interesting facts like: the laminate on the ceiling in the large hall is all from one single Australian Beech tree, the tiles on the roof were made in Sweden, only about 3% of the tiles have been replaced since it was originally built 50 years ago, and the only two things in the entire opera house not sourced from materials made in Australia are the roof tiles and the windows (French). The pipe organ inside is one of the biggest in the world. The construction of the organ was completed 6 years after the Opera House and took an additional 2 years to tune. It might be interesting to come to a pipe organ performance sometime just to witness that sound! Our friends Linda and Frits told us to be sure to check out the bathrooms, and yeah ~ the design elements carry over….very cool.
The ferry to Manly was so much fun we could have done it twice. A short walk through a pedestrian area of shops took us out to the Manly Beach area with a ton of surfers, lifesaving boat training, and folks just admiring the view. Another short walk brought us to a protected cove called Cabbage Tree Bay Aquatic Reserve, where we touched the Pacific Ocean again and strolled Shelly Beach and people watched.
How do you follow a stroll on the beach? With a beer in the very cool Rocks neighborhood where the first ship from England with its cargo of convicts landed. Those convicts would recognize the rowdy energy of the bar scene, but I reckon that’s just about the only thing that would be familiar. The neighborhood reminded us of LoDo in Denver, with a lot more water and less baseball. Historic buildings converted into chic eateries with breweries on every corner and a coffee shop on every opposite corner. We were there on Friday before St. Patricks Day celebrations so there was plenty of energy and beer drinking going on!
We absolutely loved the Darlinghurst neighborhood. This quiet neighborhood up the hill from the harbor & downtown Sydney had everything a neighborhood should have; a clinic, a grocery store, a health food/supplements store, a few clothing shops and of course crazy good food. When we are tired of making decisions, our go-to food is Italian. We lucked into an amazing Italian restaurant just a three minute walk from our house. We enjoyed a cacio e pepe tossed in an actual wheel of Parmesan and a lovely Primitivo before heading back to our AirBnb through the rainy evening.
On our stroll through the (free!) Botanic Gardens we come upon the Music Conservatorium of Sydney: both a conservatory and a high school for music and the arts in downtown Sydney. Both of us were thrown right back to our college music school experiences where anything magical can happen at any moment! Caught up in the college nostalgia, we went in to smell the nervous fear of auditioning and performances, get a drink, and use the clean and free toilets.
Would we live here? I think the answer is a definite yes. Will we visit again? Another definite yes.
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