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October 30th, 2006 by Barbara

Here I am again.

By the way, I’d like to invite all of you to share your thoughts and stories with me, so feel free to drop me a line, if you have any thoughts or suggestions.

In part 1 finished at Circular Quay in Sydney, with a coffee and a hearts proposition to start a new life in Sydney Australia.

Call me weird of foolish, but this is what happened, and yes I agree it’s rather unusual for a single woman in her late thirties, but hey that’s what it was.

I did the touristy thing, visited the Opera House, looked at what the box office had to offer, bought a ticket for a performance, all of this after I had recovered from the shock.

There is a really cool way of discovering Sydney by bus. Two operators, one is Sydney Explorer Bus and the other one is City Sightseeing. These busses offer a hop on hop off version of a guided city tour. You can do it at your leisure. These busses take you to the worthwhile seeing sights, e.g. Opera House, Darling Harbour, Bondi Beach etc. Find the links below

www.sydneypass.info/sydneyexplorer/

www.citysightseeing.com.au (a number of cities worldwide)

In my opinion this is one of the best and most individualised ways to getting an over view of a city and exploring where you are and what there is to do. Also it avoids, in my mind anyway, of being one in 50 people pouring out of a bus running towards the sight to take a picture and having to be back in 2 minutes.

The hop on hop off version gives me the opportunity to get a feel for the place and the sight as well as connecting with people if I wish to.

I didn’t know many people in Sydney or Australia. In fact I only knew one woman, Christina, whom I met in Greece a couple of years before. She used to live in the UK, but decided that she wanted to go back to Oz.

I did have her mothers contact details, because at the time we met, Christina didn’t quite know where in Australia she and her family would be ending up.

So one rainy day I picked up the phone and called Christina’s mother who was very friendly and helpful, telling me that Christina indeed was living in Australia but far away from Sydney. However, I did ask her for her daughter’s phone number, which she happily gave me and as far as I could tell it was a Sydney or at least a New South Wales number.

So I did pick up the phone and dialled the number. A child picked up the phone, and it was Alex, Christina’s son.

I introduced myself and said “Hi Alex it’s Barbara, could I please speak to your mum?” His response was Barbra Streisand?”

I had a good chuckle to myself and said “no-no, just tell her Barbara from Switzerland, whom she met in Greece, I’m sure she’ll remember me”.

To cut a rather long story short, Christina lived in the Blue Mountains, which is about 90 km from Sydney and quite easily reachable by train. Bowen Mountain exactly. So if by any chance someone knows where she is, please let me know. Her name is Christina Harris, (Kristina). She used to work in the film industry.

I got invited to stay with her and her kids for a couple of days, and we had a great time. It was very hard to leave Sydney, I could have stayed here for ever. The aim of my trip though was to see some of Australia, not necessarily too much because I believe that less is often more.

Christina and I did keep in touch during my trip, more on that in my next blog.

Till then!

Cheers

Barbara

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