February 12, 2016

Shit I Do in Sydney: Straya Day, Luna Park and Bondi to Coogee Walk

christinelouise Oceania 2016, Australia, Australia Day, beach, Bondi, chinese garden, coastalwalk, coogee, Harbour Bridge, luna park, opera house, Sightseeing, straya day, sydney, tourist

Sydney, Australia: Being a tourist in my own city, part one

In this blog post I celebrate my first Australia Day, then I go to Luna Park and the Chinese Garden of Friendship. There are also a lot of pictures from the Bondi to Coogee coastalwalk, which I am obsessed with.

Australia Day is a bit of a controversial day, but to backpackers, it’s another reason to pretend we’re actually proper Aussies now. People everywhere are wearing the Australian flag somewhere on their face or body. I go with a giant bow on my head. Sharon, Craig and I meet up for drinks at Tea Gardens in Bondi, which seems to be our bar of choice now. We sit on the sunny balcony and get hammered as one does, before we are joined by some Mildura people. Not much can be said about the night, as I don’t remember much, but I wake up with a bleeding ankle, and some videos of me dancing with a box of mac and cheese on the street. Pretty standard.

One sunny day, John and I go to Luna Park, which I have been talking about pretty much non-stop since I got to Sydney. It’s a small amusement park on the other side of Harbour bridge, so we walk around for ages just looking at the bridge and the Opera House, before I take a million pictures of the Ferris wheel, which people should know by now is one of my favourite things.

For some reason I am too cheap to buy tickets for the rides though, so I’m content with just staring at it while baking in the sun. We then go for a quick look at the Olympic pool, which is a bad idea, because it’s really tempting to just jump in in this weather.

On the way back, we find that the trains from North Sydney have stopped. Someone must’ve jumped onto the tracks somewhere. I am wearing cheap flats that I bought in K-Mart on the way over because I realised my boots were a bad choice, but turns out that these flats are even worse. I have blisters the size of my pinky toe on my actual pinky toes and heels. So in order to get back, I have to walk over the bridge, barefoot. Talk about hating life.

Since it’s Chinese New Year, Meadow and I decide to go to the Chinese Garden of Friendship one day after work, where we meet up with Aitor and his girlfriend. The garden is pretty awesome and seems so quiet and idyllic, despite being in the middle of a massive city, with ongoing construction around it. We write down our hopes and dreams for this year on red slips and attach it to strings filled with other people’s wishes for 2016. I’m a sucker for things like that.

We then go to the park in Darling Quarter, getting a few take-away coffee cups from work, and pouring a few of Aitor’s homebrewed beers in there. Drinking in public is fun and also risky. But mostly fun.

Another thing I am doing a lot while the weather is nice is walking from Bondi to Coogee. It’s an 11 km and hour-long walk from Bondi Junction to Bondi beach, then the actual coastalwalk to Coogee beach and then home to Randwick. Walking is great for clearing my head with all things going on, and looking at the ocean seriously solves all your problems. Temporarily. But yeah, I am in awe of how beautiful my home is, and I take like 30 pictures of the exact same places everytime I go, but I just wanted to share my favourite ones with you.