Sydney – Walking Upside Down
“A peasant at the Australian embassy is asked: Do you have a criminal record ?, and he answered: And what, do you still need a criminal record to get an Australian visa?”
This joke has been spinning in my head all the days of my stay in Sydney. I could not understand why the British sent criminals to this oldest city in Australia, founded as far back as 1788, rather than sending the best people of the nation there? Probably something was wrong in their head then.
You can walk around Sydney for hours. A light breeze from the ocean knocks down the heat, and numerous parks and squares make it possible to lie on pure grass in broad daylight. Although the city is large, and about four million people live in it, it is somehow not felt among the abundant greenery. In the image of Sydney, other cities of Australia were built. In Sydney, all the styles and trends of the architectural fashion of more than two centuries are mixed. Walking around the old quarter of Rocks, which was built up even during the colonization of the continent, you turn around the corner and suddenly find yourself in the midst of constructivism of the thirties of the last century, interspersed with modern skyscrapers, causing not irritation, but admiration for its absolutely correct architectural forms and extremely harmoniously blended into the surrounding space.
Be sure to go down to the port. He, together with the Harborbridge Bridge and the famous Opera House, which has become a symbol of Sydney, makes a picture, again full of harmony. Sydney jokingly call their hanger for clothes their port bridge. This steel structure, with a total length of more than a thousand meters, built in 1932, at the height of the economic crisis, and therefore painted gray in order to save money, combines power and amazing elegance.
You can go out of town to the Blue Mountains, where in the midst of stunning silence and beauty you really want to, just pulls, even if you are in a hurry, just sit and think. Or you can go the other way, to Gletswood, where the estate of one English officer who served in these places at the end of the 19th century has been preserved. And this will not be a museum, but a manor, where the real maid will meet you and lead you into the living room to the real mistress, who will seat you by the real fireplace and, if you wish, will be long and boring to tell the story of his family from a distant Irish ancestor to the present day .
Having dined in a family restaurant, you set off to look at traditional Australian fun sheep shearing. An experienced strigal must mow a sheep in two minutes. A strigal also offered me to try myself in this difficult matter, replacing not a sheep, of course, but a professional. After about ten minutes, the Australian came up to look at the fruits of my labors, and we laughed for a long time, and the poor animal, all in bald spots of torn wool, ran away with angry bleating.
In Sydney, you can swim in the ocean, ride a bike from the mountains or fly in a balloon. Or just sit in a good English pub for a glass of cold beer. For example, I did so. And while drinking beer on the embankment of Sydney Bay, I thought: it would be nice if everything in our country somehow got upside down … But that would be a completely different story.
