sydney: a chaotic love letter to australia's biggest city
so sydney. where do i even start? i landed here thinking i'd just see the opera house and leave, but this place has a way of sneaking under your skin. the city sits on this crazy beautiful harbour that looks like it was carved by giants, with the ocean on one side and these massive national parks boxing it in on all others. it's like nature decided to build a fortress and then let humans build a city inside it.
i just checked and it's 30°c there right now, hope you like that kind of thing. the humidity's at 54% which means your hair will have opinions about it, trust me.
here's the thing about sydney - it's massive. like, 12,369 km² massive. someone told me that 65% of new south wales lives in this one city, which is wild when you think about it. the sprawl goes on forever, from the flat lands of the cumberland plain to the hilly bits up north. and speaking of hills, apparently it's built on like 6km of sandstone underneath. that's commitment to geology.
you've got 70 beaches to choose from, which is just showing off if you ask me. bondi's the famous one, but someone told me that manly and cronulla are where the locals actually go. the harbour's this whole thing too - it's technically a ria, which is a fancy word for a river valley that got flooded by the sea. nature's water feature, basically.
if you get bored, the central coast and wollongong are just a short drive away. though honestly, with 5 million people here, you'd be hard-pressed to get bored. the city's got this weird mix of being super urban but also ridiculously green - 25.9% tree cover, apparently. that's not something you expect from a major metropolis.
the history's interesting too. started as a penal colony in 1788 at sydney cove, which is a fun fact to drop at parties. the northern parts didn't really develop until they built that bridge in 1932. before that, it was basically two separate cities with a harbour between them. imagine commuting that without a bridge.
someone told me that the weather can be a bit of a rollercoaster - coastal position means it can change quickly, and those hills get more rain than the flats. but that's sydney for you: beautiful, sprawling, sometimes chaotic, and always surprising. just like this blog post, really.
the thing that gets me about sydney is how it manages to be both this massive concrete jungle and still feel connected to nature. you've got skyscrapers downtown, then 20 minutes later you're in a national park or on a beach that looks like it belongs in a tourism ad. it's a city that doesn't know how to do things by halves.
so yeah, that's sydney. huge, green, beachy, and probably judging your life choices while you try to navigate its public transport system. but in a good way. mostly.
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