Mid May we flew to Sydney for five days, where I had a few meetings with colleagues. We were apparently very lucky with the weather because it had been raining for the past three weeks. We just got sun and 20 degrees!

Disconnected

The first day was mainly spent in the neighbourhood because I had a meeting with a colleague at the University of Sydney Technology, and he showed us around the beautiful “paper bag” business school, built by Frank Gehry. Getting back was a bit more troublesome for me – somehow, my New Zealand sim card wasn’t connecting to data and it turned out that calls and texts were also blocked. It was interesting, not to say the least, to find yourself thrown back in time to before we all had cell phones with roaming. I tried to get on the wifi here and there to see if Søren had gotten home yet from his walk, but that didn’t work. After ringing the doorbell and getting no answer, I went back to the restaurant of the night before to get on their wifi, but they couldn’t find their password... In the end, someone was kind enough to make a hotspot with their phone – problem solved.

Seeing the sights (and an asbestos tree)

We were based in Surry Hills which was a nice location with lots of restaurants to choose from, and also quite central. The second day we spent walking around Sydney which we loved. We walked to Darling Harbour, then to the city centre and Circular Quay, the Rocks, the Opera House, and then back via the botanical garden. We walked a total of 18km but with a good break for brunch and for dinner, so it didn’t feel that long. We also walked around Centennial Park and took a ferry to Watson’s Bay and walked around the headland there. One thing we spotted in some of the parks was that trees were fenced off with a sign of ‘asbestos’. Happily my colleague could enlighten us about the recent ‘asbestos crisis’ – apparently they had discovered that mulch spread around trees contained asbestos, so now they are spending a lot of money on meticulously removing all the mulch and cleaning the sites, with closures of parks, playgrounds and even schools.

Where are the signs??

The not so fun part was when we got totally confused in traffic one day. I had a meeting with a colleague in one of the suburbs and thought it would then be fun to explore some areas north of Sydney. That turned out to be a bad idea. Not because of the beauty of the scenery – we went to Dobroyd Head, the North Head and Manly and had some great views of the harbour – but because it was impossible to find the right way back, even if we had Google to help us. Especially the part just north of the city centre, which is a complete chaos. We went through it first from west to east, and then from north to south, and neither experience was pleasant, to say the least… Traffic signs indicating directions often came a bit too late to be of much use, because by then you are stuck in a lane with too much traffic around you to move out of it. On our way back to Sydney we were completely confused when we were sitting in a sea of cars in about 10 lanes of traffic and could choose between the tunnel or the bridge – all going south – and the only thing the GPS mentioned was Cahill Expy, which was nowhere in sight. We then found ourselves on a lane that had turned into bus lane so we had to get out of that quickly, and then, apparently, we chose the wrong lane which made it impossible to join the Cahill Expy when it did appear on the signs…

Another issue was that the situation in reality often was different from what the GPS indicated, and several times we had a split second to make a non-informed choice on where to go. So, after having crossed the harbour bridge at snail’s pace (and it was dark by then, so not that many views to be had), we even ended up smack in the middle of the central business district of the most populous city in Australia. Not a fun experience either, with bus lanes all over the place (literally, sometimes they are on the left side at the curb, sometimes they are in the middle of the road) and cars doing all kinds of crazy stuff (like park on a very busy road). And then when you keep to the left lane because you see on the GPS you need to turn left in about 1km, you find yourself forced to turn left at the next crossing… Argh!! Well, we did survive, but, boy, were we glad to see the inside of our parking garage!!