A First Time for Both of Us

Today we took the red eye between HK and Sydney. It wasn’t until the airport that I realized that this would be the first time for both Eric and me to visit the Southern Hemisphere. It is hard to believe that with all of Eric’s traveling he has never crossed that line – been near everywhere else in the north. So, this trip has some real excitement to it. Many times when I go somewhere new, like Thailand, Eric has already been, so some of the newness and awe is muted.


The View from Our Hotel

We arrived at the Sydney airport about 2 hours late this Monday morning, so Eric missed the first part of his meetings. If the first day was any indication, we’ve found the city in cool spring time, clear and crisp with confidence and vitality. The airport was smaller than we were expecting but clean. It seemed older than I would have expected with the Olympics having been here in the last decade. After a twenty minute taxi ride, we were at the hotel and got settled into our downtown place for four days.

The business district is a mix of old and new. It actually seemed oddly reminiscent of Wichita, Kansas, to me in its architecture and pristine but oddly vacant feel. There are some tall buildings but not super tall and they may be sitting next to an older sandstone four-story building. Nothing seems crowded and few things seem that new, but everything seems clean. I think perhaps the stores in Sydney’s downtown are a bit more upscale than Wichita’s, but this is but another example in my mind of how similar and how different the world can be.


"Wichita" Sydney

Australia seems an early rise, early to tackle kind of city. As I came back to the hotel from a coffee shop having done some work myself, things were picking up on the street at 5pm with traffic and the downtown shops were closing. Again, a very Wichita thing. The people on the street were quick in their movements, but didn’t seem overly hurried or stressed. There were a few, but the rush was different than Tokyo or HK walking, and I got the sense that the pace of life here was more about putting in the effort to get the exercise. The escalators that I saw today were not used for standing by ANYONE that I saw but were all walked up. It was impressive. Indeed, it seems to me that the Australians that I have seen in HK and around the world aren’t that far from the norm of Sydney. They have tended to be athletic, X-Games types. The fashions in Sydney are definitely more hip than backpacker-esc but that did shift in the two different parts of the city that I was in today.