Actually I just want to go to the hotel, take a shower and then lay down flatly. Impossible at this early time of arrival. We can only move in at two o’clock p.m. We are allowed to deposit our bags and suitcases in the luggage compartment of our hotel and afterwards we start our first tour together as a group, a city sight-seeing trip of course including the famous opera house.
At first we go to a marvellous Victorian mall for breakfast. Getting there we are already confronted with so many new impressions – eg. Ibisses are crossing just like that. Unfortunately we are too groggy to really realise everything. Later on our journey we look for the mall again, searching every street, but we cannot find it.
All in all the remaining impressions of this first day:
- Heat: If we have to wait for the green light to show we stand in the shadow of the buildings around.
- Size: What an enormous city! Already after this first day of walking around I got blisters at the soles of my feet.
- Height: Never before in my life I have been to a city with such high skyscrapers.
- Crowd: Masses of people shuffle through the urban canyons. Now at New Year’s Eve Sydney is overrun with tourists.
- Prices: Ridiculously expensive – of course, due to New Year’s Eve.
Nevertheless we fell in love with Sydney. This is our city, we will in any case return. You cannot really explain why, the town seems familiar to us, as if we weren’t strangers at all.
Our first day “down under” ends quite early. After we are finally allowed to move into our hotel rooms we very soon fall down on our beds. There are only cookies for dinner, then we fall asleep absolutely exhausted.
