Australia, Christmas visit 2001

Australia, Christmas visit 2001

Australia is a country and continent surrounded by the Indian and Pacific oceans. Its major cities – Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide – are coastal. Its capital, Canberra, is inland. The country is known for its Sydney Opera House, the Great Barrier Reef, a vast interior desert wilderness called the Outback, and unique animal species like kangaroos and duck-billed platypuses. (source: Google)

2001 was truly a crazy year for me, whilst I was working full time at ABN Amro Bank Private Banking in London, I was also doing a part-time course to complete my postgraduate education in IT Multimedia at South Bank University. The combination of working full time and studying was not my idea of fun, but I started it and I had to complete it. I was so unhappy to work in the banking world, I was trying to explore other areas of career development by adventuring into other areas of life.

By mid summer that year, I was truly fedup as I was in the middle of writing my dissertation. It was so hard to concentrate at work as a result, and this made me more miserable, but I wasn’t going to give up my course, I was kind of visualising a great new career in my head whenever I think about completing the course, so persevered with it, but I was running out of energy and steam towards the end.  In October that year, I had a terrible news from home in Indonesia, that my mum was very ill. In my current mental state of bored with my work and trying to complete my MSc course, this sad news came and hit me right in the heart.  I had to do something, so I made a drastic decision to quit my job and head back to Indonesia to concentrate on my dissertation and spend a bit of time with my mum. Well, that was a fantastic decision, everything worked wonderfully.

During the 8 weeks of staying at home with my family in Jakarta, I did find some boring moments at times, so I managed to escape Jakarta for a week break in Sydney as a solo traveller. I must admit, I didn’t like travelling alone in parts of the holiday, but booking myself into organized tours (mostly outside of Sydney) was amazing. Sydney transport system was truly amazing and organised, so city travel was very easy and pleasant.

I spent a lot of time hanging around Central Quay, is not far from so many main city attractions. From here you could take the city boat tour, taking you around the bays. Sydney has amazing restaurants, and so much cheaper than eating out in London. I stayed at the YMCA hostel, in a rather large room for only $25 a night.

Sydney is a fairly small city compared to London, but it has so many amazing attractions. The country tours are worth joining, I joined a tour to Blue Mountains, and I was very lucky I did, as a week later after I left Sydney for Jakarta, they had a serious forest fire there.

I visited Sydney just before Christmas and it was really odd to see Christmas trees everywhere and blazing hot outside. It was winter back in London, but Christmas celebrated here with hot weather and people picnic on the Bondy beach. A truly great experience.

I enjoyed Sydney greatly, and I must visit again one day.

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