A weekend of Sydney-ing around

One of my favorite parts of studying abroad in Australia is being able to wander around Sydney. It’s a bit surreal to be able to hop on a bus essentially whenever I want and roam all over Sydney. I always have some fun little adventures around Sydney and this weekend was no exception.


I spent my Saturday running all over Sydney with my roommates Courtney and Natalie. We spent the first half of the day going to a couple different markets in Sydney. The first one is called the Rozelle Markets in Balmain which is right up the road from our school in Drummoyne. We walked around there for a while and then headed onto Paddy’s Market. We never have any trouble spending our money at Paddy’s which is right by China Town near Darling Harbour and has EVERYTHING imaginable. Souvenirs, clothes, and knick-knacks galore!! Courtney and Natalie found some great deals in souvenirs for their families. Paddy’s Market has everything that all the expensive city stores have for a fraction of the price. I love Paddy’s! It’s a tourist’s dream considering the insane Sydney prices.

After we shopped til we dropped we walked back through Darling Harbour where the Blues and Jazz Festival was going on. There was a stage set up literally in the middle of the harbor with live music as we walked by. There were a few stages set up all throughout Darling Harbour with free live music. We took a ferry over to Luna Park when it was dark and the park looked incredible all lit up. There was a wedding going on when we were there and the newlyweds were riding the Ferris wheel. Courtney, Natalie, and I couldn’t resist riding it and it was so worth it. Once we reached the top of the Ferris wheel the night view of the city was gorgeous. The Opera House looked like it was right under the Harbour Bridge, two of my favorite Sydney views.

We eventually wandered over the Harbour Bridge to the Australian Hotel where they serve gourmet kangaroo, crocodile, and emu pizzas. Some other American students met us there and some of the girls and I split a kangaroo pizza. I was a bit hesitant to eat kangaroo especially after being in the outback and seeing them hopping across the bush, but it was really good! It tasted like a chewier version of a beef steak. The sauce was made of native Australian berries so it was a sweet tangy flavor. A couple of the boys got crocodile pizza which is a white meat and they said it was good too.

Sunday morning my four roommates and I had a little mini-road trip with our host dad, Wayne. He took us about an hour up to the north side of Sydney where our favorite Australian television show, Home and Away, is filmed at Palm Beach. Home and Away is a pretty cheesy Australian soap opera but we can’t help ourselves, we love it! Home and Away has been going on for around forty years and almost every famous Australian actor or actress got their start on the show.

Palm Beach is a quiet isolated part of Sydney that had rocks on one side and a cliff with a stunning light house on the other. It was chilly but there were still some die hard surfers out catching some waves including a fifty-year old lady! There was a little café across the street and a little bit down the road the Palm Beach Markets were going on. We stopped and looked around for a bit and the markets were really interesting. There were a lot of homemade clothes, scarves, hats, bags, soaps, and house wares. They had a little playground area set up and vendors selling coffee and food. The vendors were all local and it was a really chill atmosphere. I think if I lived in Australia I would want to live in a more isolated part of the city. Sydney is such a huge sprawling city and every part of it is different.

We walked around Palm Beach pretending to be Martha, Hugo, Romeo, Nicole, and all the Home and Away characters and then after went walked around the market we headed back down the coast. We stopped at a couple other beaches to look around and had our lunch, “banana sangers”, or sandwiches at a beach that Wayne used to surf at when he was younger. On his he put bananas, butter, and sugar. We snuck some peanut butter on ours! We drove down a bit further and stopped at the Hubbard Diggers club and got potato wedges for a snack. The restaurant was right on the water and we watched the AFL game for a bit.

We headed back home after we ate at the club and we were home in time for us girls to go to St. Andrew’s Anglican Church where we’ve been going to the 5:30pm service called Fix Church. I really like Fix because the age group is upper high school, college students, and a couple young married couples. Everyone is very welcome and opening and I really really like the messages every week. They have been both interesting and challenging. It’s been interesting because of the cultural differences and the different teaching style. Challenging because each message makes me leave thinking about a change I need to make it my life.

After the service there is always “supper” for everyone to talk and hang out. Supper is sometimes actual supper like soup and bread or sometimes it’s just doughnuts and cookies with coffee. Last week it was Fix Church’s 9th “birthday” so there was a birthday cake and a little party. There is a strong sense of community and we’re never standing by ourselves for very long before someone from the congregation comes and strikes up a conversation with us. The pastor, Josh, always has some American trivia questions for us which can be pretty humorous. He e-mailed me wanting to talk about the differences between American and Australian churches which could be a really fun conversation!

In case it wasn’t obvious enough, Australia is still completely wonderful and my three weeks left here are going to go by way too quickly.

"Mrs. Boss! Mrs. Boss! I gotta go walkabout!"

Walkabout. Going walkabout was something that Australian Aboriginals did as part of their initiation ceremonies as they grew up in order to be able to marry or be considered “men” and “women” and no longer children. Part of my Indigenous Cultures class here was that we got to go on a walkabout in the Blue Mountains for the day. We had a trail guide named Evan who was an Aboriginal Australian himself so we were very privileged to get this very unique learning experience that put everything we had been learning in a classroom setting out into its original setting. Taking forty people on a hike in areas where there were not trails may have been a daunting task but Evan didn’t seem to mind.

When we first began our hike the area was the typical dry Australian bush but as we went further into the mountain we got to experience the beautiful rainforest atmosphere of the Blue Mountains. Our first stop was at a sacred site where the initiation ceremonies began. Evan told us dreaming stories, which are stories about how the people live, their customs, and their creation story. There was a small pond in the rock where we stopped that they called the Rainbow Serpent and there were carvings in the rock that would help tell the dreaming stories to the young men. By pouring water on them from the pond, the Rainbow Serpent was said to have helped them be able to focus for hours while they were being told the dreaming stories. The point was to focus on the feeling of water running down their outside physical bodies until they felt the same sensation inside and were able to center themselves. One of the dreaming stories Evan told us was illustrated by carvings in the rock. There was a wallaby mother on one side of the rock and a baby wallaby with a snake on the other side. The story was that the mother was not focusing and her mind had wandered until she was not paying attention to her baby who was in grave danger from the snake. The point of the story was to not let your thoughts wander but to remain connected with your senses from help from the Rainbow Serpent.

We hiked some more to a large sandstone cave where we stopped for lunch and Evan taught us how to paint with ocher as the Aboriginals would have. Ocher is natural paint made from charcoal and other natural mineral stones that you grind and mix with water until it makes a paint. He showed us some symbols for water, kangaroos, the rainbow serpent, emu, meeting places, men, women, and how the Aboriginals use these symbols to paint their dreaming stories. We painted our own dreaming stories on rocks, bark, and leaves and at the end we all painted our faces. It was a lot of fun to get to learn in a creative way in the middle of the beautiful Blue Mountains.

Our last stop was at another cave where Evan told us some more about the Aboriginal people’s ceremonies and initiation. He told us about the final stages the men would have to go through in order to be allowed to marry and that men usually didn’t complete their ritual until they were at least 25. Women would finish as early as 14 and would be allowed to marry a lot younger. Throughout the hike Evan had us try different leaves and smell different barks which he explained to us were Bush medicines. Some of the leaves tasted minty and one even tasted a bit like licorice. We also tested out a natural nasal decongestant...

Hiking through the Blue Mountains on a “walkabout” made me notice thing that I would probably not have noticed on my own. I would certainly have not realized that the first sacred site we went to was a site important to the oldest living culture in the world! It was an intense hike but it was really invigorating and I really enjoyed being out in the middle of nowhere without cell phones or iPods and people worrying about schedules. It’s no surprise to me that the Aboriginal peoples of Australia used the Blue Mountains as part of their ceremonies.

Ultimate Tourist Day!!

I have been blessed to make a really nice Aussie friend named Sarah who was gracious enough to take me on what she calls the, “Ultimate Tourist Day.” She said that she and her friends love going on tourist days around Sydney and finding fun new spots to hang out at. She picked me, one of my roommates, Natalie, and one of our friends Greg up at 8am on a Saturday morning and then the adventure began!

The four of us hopped into Sarah’s car and had no idea what was in store for us for the day. Our first stop was Bradley’s Head where we had a picnic breakfast that Sarah packed for us which was delicious. Bradley’s Head looks out across the water at the Sydney skyline and the Harbour Bridge. There is a wharf where a few men were fishing and a footpath that went through a really pretty bush area by the water. We all put on wicked Aussie flag tattoos, because what tourist day is complete without one, and then walked a bit along the path.

After we ate breakfast, we went across the Harbour Bridge into the city and parked and then walked to the Luna Park, which is a bit like Chicago’s Navy Pier. Luna Park is an old fashion retro theme park/carnival that closed for a while but reopened for the public and looks exactly like it did when it first opened. The entrance is a really creepy clown head thing but it’s really fun inside because it all still looks vintage and retro. It’s right on the water and a ferry goes right to it. After we took a bunch of fun and silly pictures we headed to get a pick-me-up at a small café.

After being caffeinated we felt prepared to walk across the Harbour Bridge. I was a bit surprised because the bridge wasn’t quite what I expected. It has a fence that goes up so I felt a bit caged in on the bridge, which I realize is for safety purposes but it did ruin the effect a bit! We went up one of the pylons of the bridge which had an amazing view though. For $9 you can climb a bunch of stairs to walk through up to the top of the pylon where there is a display of information about the bridge and you walk outside and can see all around the bridge. You can literally see almost all of Sydney from atop of the pylon. I could see the Opera House, the Rocks, Circular Quay, Darling Harbour, and even the Gladesville Bridge, the bridge I cross every morning to get to school. It was beautiful!

After the bridge we went through Circular Quay to go to the Royal Botanical gardens where Greg climbed some random trees, I made friends with a duck I named Quizie, and we saw an anti-democracy socialist protest march. We grabbed lunch from a vendor by the garden and had lunch in one of the garden’s pavilions and had to defend our food from some very nosey birds. The Botanical gardens is of course very pretty and overlooks the water right beside the Opera House. When we finished lunch we went to the Sydney YHA because one of Sarah’s friends works there and he let us up to the rooftop where there is yet another amazing view of Sydney. Everywhere you go Sydney is gorgeous!

One of my favorite parts of the day was taking a ferry across to Watson’s Bay. Watson’s Bay is a really chill and relaxed part of Sydney and there is a small beach and a park right across from the wharf. There were two weddings going on so we saw part of a ceremony ending and another newlywed couple taking pictures on the beach. We were getting tired at this point so we relaxed at the park for a while and watched the sunset across the water and it was stunning. It was a nice way to end a super busy day because it was just completely relaxing. We grabbed fish n’ chips at a place called Doyles that was right on the wharf and ate and talked while we waited for our ferry to take us back across to Sydney. It was a long twelve hour day but we got to go to a lot of parts of Sydney that we hadn’t been to yet which is always good!