Day 2 - “There appears to be a hell of a lot of homeless and strange people knocking about”

Landed in Sydney at 7.10am to find the weather was fairly diabolical. I had already heard that it was bad but it felt like what I’d left back in England.

Got a free shuttle to the hostel and met a couple of people also travelling on the journey, they were staying elsewhere though.

I was fairly let down by the fact it was another morning again, plus an early one at that, all I wanted to do now was sleep.

The Hostel

Caught the free breakfast and let myself into my room.  Initially I’m thinking four flights of stairs are going to be hard work each day. The room looked like somebody had been living in it for years. Very strange, I thought a hostel was a place where you usually only stay for a couple of nights, but this room even had clothes hanging on the beds like a wardrobe.

I thought to myself that although I’m so incredibly tired, I couldn’t go to sleep then because I would just get in the wrong sleeping pattern right from the off.

The rain had cleared up so I decided to go out exploring. For obvious reasons I wanted to go find the Opera House, Harbour Bridge and Botanical Gardens.

Very Bright

 Without any clue, idea or sense of direction of where I was I found them all. They’re both pretty amazing and I’d never really expected to see them in my life. Sydney always seemed like a distant place, well it is a distant place but I thought it was one of them places I would only ever see in photos.

The annoying thing was I wasn’t actually able to go up onto the Opera House because they were setting things up for the MTV ARIA Awards the next day.

iChatting

To my surprise the actual Opera House itself has a free Wi-Fi connection for guests. I was a big fan of that considering I had my laptop on me. I logged on and because it wasn’t open I just leant up against the building and I was able to iChat my girlfriend and best mate Alex. Once again this was a pretty surreal thing to be doing. Being tens of thousands of miles away from home and having the ability to see and talk to a familiar face is mind-blowing.

Me & Alex

A mini storm came overhead for about 10 minutes and it poured down, it did pass though so I took a walk around Circular Quay and bought some postcards for the girls I had been living with back in England that I had promised them.

My first impressions of Sydney so far are that as a city it is a pretty spectacular place. It has reminiscent elements of England but better. One negative point though is that there appears to be a hell of a lot of homeless and strange people knocking about. But I’m thinking maybe that’s fairly normal for cities in general.

Bridge

From Circular Quay I continued on towards the Bridge and back around behind towards an area called The Rocks. I’m not sure if the market is on all the while or if it was just because it was a Saturday but it was one of the best non-food markets I had ever seen. So many unique things that people had made and were flogging, from Sculptures to Jewellery, Corn on the Cob to Spray Paintings. It kind of reminded me of all the people that do the street art around the beach in Ibiza.

The Rocks Market

Deeper into The Rocks I was offered a 1 minute free neck massage, I was only too happy to oblige considering I’d had 2 rough flights and carrying bags that weigh a ton.

Worked my way into what seemed to be the city centre and I found an Apple Store, perfect place to upload all the photos I’d already taken so far. I decided to buy a phone whilst I was out. I knew I would have to get one soon so I thought no time like the present. It was only $29 for £20 of credit and a phone. I thought that was a pretty good deal.

Started walking back to the hostel at about 6pm. When I got back everybody was having a BBQ on the roof. I was knackered so layed on my bed. One of my roommates then came in and I got chatting to him. His name was Aaron and he was from Bolton. He said that they the 2 other people in the room were girls called Hannah and Jess from Stoke.

They were all going out, I said I’d give it a miss because I was so knackered.

I fell asleep in a flash.