Sydney: A City Best Seen from the Water

It's been five weeks to the day since I first arrived in Sydney and I've only posted one blog post and it didn't even have photos. I am a lousy tour guide! Well, part of the reason is that I just haven't felt like I've done a whole lot. Sure I've seen things, but Australia is much different than Scotland in that there just aren't the centuries of tangible history that is so evident in Scotland. It's not to say that Australia doesn't have its own unique history, it's just a different kind of history.

My first week in Australia, after getting acclimated to the chilly winter was spent at Macquarie University, where I am now studying, planning my first excursion out into the region of New South Wales that is my research area. I am here to study a bunch of sediment that has caused quite a stir. The sediment has been deposited over the last few centuries, but when it actually started to be eroded from its original undisturbed sites and why or how are not well understood. That's where I come in. I'll sort all of that out in the long run, but after reading about this sediment for five months while in Glasgow, it was about time I actually went out to see some of it!

We were in the field for a week, and pretty much just driving around visiting different rivers and looking for the type of sediment we are interested in. We would drive to two or three potential sampling sites each day, and with breakfast and lunch in there, we somehow always managed to fill the day with things to do. Often, though, we would also get stopped by the scenery, or wildlife (kangaroos and a real live echidna!), or other roadside oddities. Lots of time was spent on farms, or in rural areas, looking at creeks. The Australian landscape, even where vegetated, is harsh and demanding. Much of the region surrounding Sydney was deforested for sheep and cattle grazing, but even that was beautiful in its own way. Of course, paddocks can't compete with the natural landscape, and I got my fill of both, driving through a few National Parks along the way.

TONS of kangaroos near Canberra

One really cool experience I had in the field was getting stuck in a snow storm! Most Australians have told me you never see snow in Australia (though I swear I saw some downtown a few weeks ago - not many flakes, but definitely snow!). Anyway, we were driving through Namadji National Park in the southern end of the Australian Capitol Territory and the weather and scenery were beautiful! On the other side of the mountains, however, it started getting blustery and as we drove into the small town of Adaminaby, there were big, puffy, flakes of snow blowing around! It was such an experience that even the woman who owned the cafe we were eating at ran outside with her camera saying that she had never seen anything like it in her life before! Well, from Adaminaby to Cooma and almost all the way back to Queanbeyan, where we were staying, we had to drive carefully and slow to a creep just to get through some parts of it! An awesome experience that extremely few Aussies have had the chance to see! 

Driving into the snowstorm

Here are some more photos from the field:


Once we got back from the field, I realized I needed to put a budget together for my research over the next year and a half (something I'm still working on!). It's a tedious process, and right now, while I'm still settling down, there's not much else I've really been able to do around the city, and since I don't know too many people yet, it's been a slow-going process checking things out. Over the last few weeks, I decided that while I like the apartment I am in right now and my flatmate, I really longed to be somewhere near a park, the water, or some semblance of nature. Sorry Parramatta Road, just not cutting it. Also, I'd love to be closer to a train line or one of the ferry terminals. Somewhere that is just easier to move around. So in looking for other apartments, I've seen a fair bit of the city.

The nice thing, though, was that last week, one of my best friends from high school was back in Sydney! Arianne moved to Australia last September though hadn't been living in Sydney, but last week our paths crossed and we spend a lot of our free time checking out different neighborhoods. We had drinks and Indian food in Newtown, shopped at the Glebe Market on a Saturday morning, took the ferry out to Manly Beach, spent an afternoon in the Botanical Gardens, and had a few schooners (rather than pints) at the Fortune of War, Sydney's oldest pub. It was so much fun seeing a face from home.

I think sometimes when you have these big life-changing moves around the world, you almost wonder if the rest of your life leading up to this moment actually happened. Sure, I talk to my friends and family frequently, but you get this nagging suspicion that it's all part of some larger conspiracy theory against you, making you think none of it is real. But then you get the chance to go home and see that everything is, in fact, still there. I haven't had the chance to go home, and probably won't while I'm here, but seeing Arianne really lifted my spirits and somehow I knew things down here would turn out all right.

I'll leave a bunch of photos here, and I've put captions with them to give you an idea of what they are, but there's no real story to them yet. Nice scenery, though, if I can say so.