Australia, New South Wales, Sydney

I think – I THINK – I have settled now. So here are my first notes.

Sydney is big. I mean really big. And it gets even bigger when you try to minimize your public transportation use. Not because it’s dodgy or something – it’s great. As a matter of fact it’s so great, people thank the driver getting off the bus. Seriously, everybody yells thank you, even if they’re getting out through the back door. No, I avoid buses in order to see more, feel more, soak up the sun and feel the humid warmth in my lungs and my bones. Yes, it’s usually 25-32 degrees Celsius.

It’s a living, breathing organism. Literally. Their cockroaches are the size of my palm. You see them everywhere. And then in one night you see a huge rat running by, a bat is throwing food at you and you step on some sort of a huge slimy moving thing in your kitchen. Awesomeness.

It’s laidback. I’ve never been to a place so busy and yet so relaxed at the same time; the coexistence of these contrasting traits, to my mind, is what makes up Sydney. This is why the first two weeks I’d leave home at 10am and get back at 12am – the city grips you and doesn’t want to let go. I didn’t put up a fight.

I have a home now. Compared to my shoebox in Denmark this is a palace and people are already joking around that I won’t leave my Ivory tower without a good reason. I live in an old terrace house (quote from Wikipedia: “Terraced houses in Australia refers almost exclusively to Victorian and Edwardian era terrace houses or replicas almost always found in the older, inner city areas of the major cities.”) It looks something like this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Paddington2_terrace.jpg

The area is called Glebe, which is known for being a bit alternative and hipster. What I love about it is the Saturday flea market, the tiny cafés where everybody sits back to back, antique book stores and simply the feeling – I stroll down the main street at least twice a day and stop by the same fruit market and chemist store every week – I get to know people – because all the stores and small, personal, like you’re transported back in time when there were no supermarkets and people knew the ones who sold them food from a local farm (as their grandfathers knew each other).

I didn’t even think I’d like those times until now: the two Asians who own a post office/groceries store call me “the girl from Europe” every time I drop by, and an aged Italian lad working at Pastabella café winks if he sees me pass by. A guy from a seafood restaurant promised to call if a job opening comes up. These little instances of everyday personal interaction warm my heart and make me realize that the world we live in has made us become indifferent to each other to an extent we don’t even realize.

Things happen here. I can’t even begin to describe the feeling of seeing Annie Leibovitz originals, almost touching them, grasping the depth of the colours, the texture of background and the intensity of emotion when a picture is 2X2m. I would have never even dreamt of this opportunity and there I was, staring at Susan Sontag in a casket, almost crying, so moved I could not talk.

Or last night – I went on YouTube and at the top there was a banner saying, “YouTube Symphony live streaming from Sydney Opera”. Jumped in a cab and 10min later I was standing at awe in front of those magical projections, feeling the breeze of Sydney harbour on my skin, fighting the occasional raindrops and glaring at the full moon hanging on the side of the opera café.

There are three Lonely Planet travel books on my night table – I brought them all the way from home no matter that they added perhaps 3kg to my ridiculously poor luggage. But every time I open them now it’s no longer some distant ephemeral thing I’m looking at – it’s my present, it’s very much real and it humbles me. I bow down once again before fate and, most of all, my parents, who provided me with this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

I can’t really tell you why exactly I’m so amazed. Nothing’s too new – I’ve seen the skyscrapers millions of times, swam in both Atlantic and Pacific oceans, saw many cultures and met many people. One of those countries that truly took my breath away was Syria, but I never had the feeling I could reside there. Whereas Sydney… Something just clicked. It’s like the feeling when you know you’ve forgotten something, but you can’t remember what and you don’t even remember where to look for it, and then – bam – you find it, and a sudden wave of relief ripples through your body head to toe. That’s how I feel. Like I’m finally home.