Remember movie Dil Chahta Hai and the way Aamir and Preity danced in Luna Park to the song, ‘Jaane Kyon Log Pyaar Karte hain’… and remember that fat, round lady singing oooh… aaah….. in the Opera House…. 🙂 That’s Sydney… The place was so mesmerizing in the movie that I always dreamt of going there.
So when a new project was being announced in my earlier organization and we were told that we would have to go to Sydney for a week for trainings and all, it was like a dream come true… 🙂 Wow…But, the problem was that it exactly coincided with our trip to South to attend a cousin’s wedding. My husband and my daughter went ahead for the wedding while I was struck in Delhi, waiting eagerly for the visa. 🙁 We had applied for visas about 15 days prior to the visit and we had not got the visa even on the last day before the travel. Those few days were really frustrating. With family away and having missed the cousin’s wedding, I was not even sure if I would get the visa and go to Australia. Thankfully, we got the visa finally at 7 in the evening and the flight to Sydney was in the early morning next day… Believe me, I packed off my entire suitcase for my dream destination only after reaching back home that night…. Thanks to Amma who thoughtfully packed a sweater for it was really cold in Australia..
There were 6 more colleagues who traveled with me. The flight was via Hongkong and the stopover in Hongkong was almost 8-9 hours.. Like me, all others traveling with me were also first timers…
We scanned the entire airport in those 8-9 hours.. had tea, fries etc… and like all Indians, we also calculated the Dollar-Rupee conversion and decided to have dinner in the flight itself. 🙂
We got into the connecting flight in the night and reached Sydney in the early morning next day.. While the flight navigation showed that we were flying over Australia, we craned our necks to see a vast land down below but it looked so empty… Australia is a vast continent which covers from Perth on one side to Sydney on the other side and is approximately 29 lakh sq miles while the population is only about 2.1 crores.. So, less than 10 people per sq mile… which is quite unbelievable in India… In India, it would be about 1000 people per sq mile.. 🙂
We stayed in hotel Crowne Plaza in a place called Paramatta in New South Wales. We did not waste even a single minute in the hotel. Got ourselves ready and went on a ferry ride from Paramatta to Sydney Harbour Bridge.
It took us about 1 hour to reach the Harbour Bridge and it was the most spectacular trip. Was reminded of the backwaters in Kerala… Having reached the Harbour Bridge, we went to Opera House, it was so good to see it live..
In fact, the day we went there, there was some Australian Idol competition going on and we heard some young people singing away… We took a bus from there and got down at some place on CBD and then walked back all the way.. We really were behaving like some real crazy Indian tourists. 🙂
An amazing thing in Australia was that the shops close down by 4:30pm… People there value the quality of life and they like to spend more time with the family than at work, which can never happen in other countries. On week-days, our training sessions would get over only by evening 5:30pm and by that time all the shops would close and we would not get time to shop at all.. So, in order to get the feel of the shops, we would finish off our lunch in just 5-10 minutes and utilize the rest of the lunch hour in window-shopping and other things.. Anyways, shopping was very expensive there and most of the stuff would be labeled with ‘Made in China’.. 🙂
One evening, we all went to Darling Harbour and had dinner in a restaurant called ‘Zaffran’.
The dinner was good and the place was heavenly. The night scene was so lively and colourful.
My distant cousin, who was studying and working in Sydney, came over one evening and took me on a trip to Bondi beach.
It was such a lovely beach with waters so clean and a sight to behold. I kept breathing in the place and then we had a quick dinner of pizzas in the road-side restaurant and came back to the hotel by the local train.
While my colleagues went back to India after a week, I had to stay back for another one week as my boss was a resident of Australia. Well, it would seem that my dream trip was extended but actually speaking, it was the most torturous one week for me and I was waiting eagerly to come back to India. I stayed in Stamford hotel in North Ryde, which was located in a deserted kind of place. Even inside the hotel, I would hardly ever see anybody much.
In fact, all the roads in Sydney used to look deserted too. After office, I would directly come back to the hotel and would never dare to venture out on my own. And, to give myself a feeling that I had people around, I would switch on the TV at full volume. 🙂 There was just 1 Indian vegetarian dish served in the hotel– Daal makhani and half-cooked rice and I would somehow manage to gulp it down. To get authentic Indian food in Sydney was not an easy task. Also, if you are a Vegetarian on top of it, it becomes even more challenging. And, most of the days, I remember surviving on bread alone.
I remember the weekend when I was alone and I did not know what to do. I had booked myself for a trip to Blue-mountains and had to go to some place to catch the bus but did not have the guts to go there early in the morning so had canceled the booking. Such was the fear.. 🙁 I decided to visit a distant relative instead, who stayed in Ashfield. Went by local train and it was a good adventurous trip.
I visited the Luna Park next day on my own and was remembering Aamir and Preity.. 🙂
On my return back to the airport, my cab driver was a Pakistani and he spoke wonderful Hindi. We chatted a lot and I got to know that there was no tax on the income earned by cabbies and there were many professionals who took cab-driving as a part-time job.. :-).. Not sure how much of that was true. He even invited me over for lunch/dinner the next time I visited Sydney… 🙂
I have been to Sydney twice and it is one of the cleanest places but the loneliest place too unless you have people around..
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