Week 1 - In Sydney with Katwoman

On the Danish web pages we read that the terrible forest fires in Victoria have reached your headlines. It was absolutely terrible and when the wind was in south, we could smell the fires from the northern suburbs of Sydney but they couldn’t be compared with the fires near Melbourne, so mother don’t worry!

This week Katrine showed me most of Sydney – It’s nice to know where Katwoman will live the next few months. We've been out walking on the cliffs at Bondi, and I was impressed with all of Sydney’s beautiful beaches which are accessible by public transportation from the city center. I would still say that the beaches in Portugal are just slightly better, but they are also world class and incomparable.

Sydney offers fantastic opportunities to take amazing pictures of the harbour area where the famous Opera House and Harbour Bridge are located. This means that I have hundreds of photos of the Opera House and the bridge. Sydney has something so unusual for a metropolis: a quay used by thousands of commuters every day. Looking at the Opera House, and as a friend of several sailors, I can see the beauty of arriving by sea.



Last Saturday Anne, Katrine and I went on a trip to the Blue Mountains. The name Blue Mountains is derived from the characteristic blue haze seen from a distance. The trip was absolutely fantastic and we had the funniest guide, which also managed to throw us some quality information in between all the jokes! Sunday we went to the famous Taronga zoo. We saw the obligatory Koala, but I still direct my eyes towards the crowns of the eucalyptus trees in the hope of the real thing (People keep telling me, there are no koalas in Perth, but I will keep looking…). But since 14 of the 15 most venomous snakes reside on this continent, I also have to keep an eye on my feet and surroundings. The snakes they exhibited in Taronga though weren’t that active but napping when I was there.



All in all a fantastic week as tourists here in Sydney while we looked for accommodation for Anne and Katrine. Anne stayed temporarily with an Australian friend while Katrine and I had been living at a hostel until Anne’s colleague, Line, suggested that we stayed at her apartment in Hyde Park.
We celebrated crown princess Mary’s birthday with Danes living in Sydney at a place called Sleep in – which was the place where our crown prince couple meat each other – nice place by the way.

Katrine and Anne finally had success in their search for housing after they had visited several places, which did not meet the ladies’ standards or ladies in general. They have now found a nice little apartment by the world-famous Bondi Beach, but there is no "rice included”. Something more than a few landlords offered (a sign of the growing Asian population in Australia).

Before my departure to Perth we went on a trip to Katrine’s University. It was impressive with brand new buildings, small lawns where you could enjoy the weather and great sports complexes, and much more. Can’t imagine Katrine ever sees half of the university before her stay ends. She will be busy this semester before we meet up again, in the middle of the Australian desert; it is rather romantic, if you are using both halves of the brain. I miss her already.

The flight to Perth was 6 hours, but then I had not just crossed a country but a whole continent and three time zones. Perth is the capital of Australia's largest state Western Australia (WA) with a population of 1.7 million living within 100 kilometers of the city center. The area of WA is 2 million square kilometers and the total population in the whole state is 2 million. For this reason Perth is described as the most isolated city on the planet with the nearest city more than 2000 kilometers away...