making up syllables: i left my shoes in sydney

they had to make a new south wales because the old one was full of sheep and welsh people. heyo! new south wales, aka. the first state, is home to sydney and some other places that you've probably never heard of. like byron bay for example. have you ever heard of byron bay, australia? well who are you, ken jennings?

byron bay was nice and almost exactly like a queensland city aside from actual territory. it felt in most ways like cairns or airlie beach. all except one that is: no lagoon. yes, it seems that the lagoon is indeed a unique feature to queensland cities. probably for the very reason i first guessed last post: the all year round warm weather. which i can now attest does not exist in the southern states.

yes, byron bay was to be our last of dose of the immaculate weather we had all throughout queensland. although it only takes about 6 hours to get from brisbane to sydney, the weather change is considerable. days in new south wales are mild, often pleasant, if not downright hot. nights however pitch deeply into the cold zone. lately i've taken to sleeping in double pairs of socks. sometimes i wear jeans in lieu of pajama pants or sweats. sleeping inside the camper, as opposed to the tent-top, has become a luxury.

most of new south wales was one innocuous coastal town after fairly similar innocuous coastal town. and then you hit sydney. sydney felt a lot bigger than brisbane almost immediately. we learned from our brizzy experience and found a hostel in city limits with a car park. this turned out to be one of the best deals of the trip – $20 a night, free parking, free wifi, and walking distance to the central business district.

we arrived in sydney fairly early and so we had most of the day to spend exploring. our first stop was for lunch around our hostel in the surry hills neighborhood. this area is akin to park slope in brooklyn. lots of restaurants, bars, etc. except not overly expensive. following lunch we walked toward the cbd and took a walk through their 1/6th scale hyde park and over to the australia museum. i think jamie was hoping the museum would be more historical and more specifically australian in context but it was much more of a natural history museum instead. some exhibits were interesting, such as the exhibit on native australian fauna, both extinct and living; others were less so, specifically the entire floor dedicated to australian minerals.

after the museum we found ourselves naturally heading toward sydney's star attraction, the opera house. there was a tiny hope that we could get tickets for some sort of production but the only thing playing was south pacific. we decided to pass, but we did stick around and take some photos. well jamie took some photos. my camera decided to get a critical error just at this most photogenic of points – on one side the opera house, across the bay on the other, the harbor bridge, and on the opposite side, luna park. i have but few precious photos of the view. soz.

following the harbor we headed over to the rocks, the oldest part of sydney. the rocks are at the entrance to harbor bridge and therefore just across from the opera house. the views probably hike up the cost of living in the area: we had small pizzas for about $20 and $7 beers. instead of wasting money on shitty beer we headed back toward our hostel and slipped into a nondescript bar that was luckily hosting some live music. we had some whiskies, listened to some girl jazz, and called it a night.

our overall experience in sydney was far more touristy than in brisbane, which is probably just the nature of sydney. on day two, for example, we started off by taking a trip to the sydney tower eye, a large tower not unlike the namsan tower in seoul or the needle in seattle. the eye was about 275 meters tall and featured an impressive 360 of sydney – you'll see some of the photos below. what you won't see photos from is our skywalk experience. this was purely jamie's idea as i'd never give someone $60 to dangle precariously over some rails in 70 mph wind. but it was admittedly worth it. the skywalk, if you haven't guessed, is a grated walkway outside of the tower eye, actually slightly further up from the interior. you're given special suits and harnesses to wear and then taken outside to face the heights and the elements. the wind was particularly gusty on our visit and we almost had to cut the trip short. i had a momentary panic attack on the glass floored portion and again when rounding the corner and feeling the full brunt of the wind, but overall i think i managed fairly well. i didn't shit myself or puke all over someone so…great success!

after the tower we went over to darling harbor, another touristy area where you can find a zoo, a wax museum and an aquarium. the day before we arrived in sydney, angelina jolie had taken her motley crew of children to the aquarium and we figured if it was good enough for them it was probably good enough for us. it was also good enough for a massive crew of school children and so we ultimately did a speed tour. the last aquarium i had been in was the one in busan and i was massively hung over so it was nice to see all sorts of weird fishes, but then again we had just been to the reef so the separation between fish and viewer was all the more noticeable.

i used the big city opportunity to get a haircut (from a korean stylist – average men's haircut in australia is around $40, and mine was $20 and looks just fine, thank you internet) and jamie used the downtime to connect with a friend from korea. i met them after my cut at a bar up the street and we got a bit of the lowdown on living in australia from jamie's friend alex, who has been here for a little over a year. she's managed to do a bit of everything from teaching english to waiting tables, and is currently writing for a food magazine and freelancing on the side. not a bad gig. she interviewed franz ferdinand (the band, not the assassinated ruler) recently as a side thing. all in all it would seem like she was doing well. but she quickly informed us that she was not entirely happy. the reason was two-fold and i think both are fairly telling in terms of different aspects of, oh i don't know, i'll just say my generation.

alex initially moved to australia to join her boyfriend who is a native ozzie. but when someone moves to join someone else who has already established themselves in a place that tends to mean the new person is more likely to be stuck in their social sphere. she arrived and his friends were her friends and his hangouts were her hangouts. she was simply adopting his experiences without making new ones on her own. in a way jamie and i are sharing in our experience as well but at least we are forming it together. our introduction into australia may be even easier than hers even though she had a personal tour guide, so to speak, simply because we have the opportunity to head in separate directions. furthermore, a part of the reason she can't move right away is because her boyfriend has job-related ambitions tied to australia, which means its either his happiness or hers. so what's the point here? relationships are tough? travel alone? i'm not entirely sure but i think it serves as a good warning tale.

the second reason is far more common with kids my own age and that reason was she was growing bored. another term you may use for bored in this case would be dissatisfied or even disappointed. and you may be thinking, "why, how could one get bored living in a foreign country? is that not the very reason she's there in the first place – because it is new, because it is exciting?" and indeed that is probably part of why she's here. but this is also fairly illustrative of what many journalist have deemed the problem with our generation. we tire of routine, and worse, we feel it unworthy of our time. a job is after all still a job regardless of where you lay your head at night and we want something more. we want perhaps personal fulfillment rather than long-term security and in doing so we eschew the traditional values of society for the values of the individual. the traveling worker cultivates the self rather than the community, for what is community to the traveller? an ever changing cast of characters passing along their own stories. the irony of this of course is that with each new person you meet the uniqueness of your own experience becomes more diluted so that you feel, for example, dissatisfied working as a journalist in australia. you therefore desire something new, something to rekindle that feeling of individual accomplishment, another page written in the story of yourself. but what's so bad about cultivating your own personal story? that's what life is, right, and that's how we write ourselves into history beyond our limited scope, in a sense, by sharing an incredibly engaging story. our incredibly engaging story. and furthermore, with the growing dominance of digitized marketplaces, outsourced menial tasks, and not to mention an over educated general public, does an intervaled work pattern actually start to make sense? i think i've lost my original thread and have become defensive about my life choices against a non-existent antagonist. the point is that this lifestyle creates a problematic loop where one interesting experience requires another to satisfy a new idea of happiness. you can see that in alex's dissatisfaction and probably with my own bit of globetrotting.

so ok, well anyway to rejoin the story already in progress…she showed us around the neighborhood, meaning surry hills which is where she stayed as well. we eventually parted ways and jamie and i went out for dinner and drinks. i found a trendy a gelato place which i found delightful and jamie found puzzling that anyone would want gelato at 9 p.m. and would spend as much for it. i laughed in his face and told him he didn't know how to live. no. i didn't. we had some drinks and then called it a night.

the next morning before leaving we stopped at a bakery that alex told us about which, no lie, had the best muffin i've ever had - raspberry and chocolate, gooey, full of fat, ugh. my initial impressions of sydney were lukewarm, probably due to the overcast weather when we first arrived, but again i think i could see myself living there. particularly in the surry hills neighborhood, which is evidently not out of the question since, as i said, alex lives there. so, i guess it's still all up in the air at this point. it's all on you now melbourne.

having left sydney we made our way inland into the blue mountains and stopped at a place called scenic world, an old mining area on a massive gorge and a place of cultural significance to the aboriginals. today it is somewhat of an amusement area with a couple of cable cars and the worlds steepest train ride, which i don't doubt is true at all. i think the specific angle is 52 degrees at its steepest point. upon arriving i realized i had left my shoes underneath the bunk at the hostel in sydney and seeing as we were about half a day out i decided to give up on them. anyway, scenic world is true to its name and i hope the pictures at least illustrate it's beauty a little bit. after one last night in new south wales we were off to victoria, home to melbourne, our final destination.