First impressions of Sydney by Hannah Vogel
By Hannah Vogel
Not Australian: My friend Kathrin and me having a night out.
Sydney: Sydney is the biggest city in Australia. It spans from the Pacific Ocean to the foothills of the Great Dividing Range covering an area of 7500 km2.
Me: I am nineteen-year-old Hannah Vogel. Until now I lived in Germany in a small town, having seven thousand inhabitants. Now I am staying in Sydney doing an internship at Eastside Radio.
There are a lot of people like me, coming to this metropolis from all over the world for any number of reasons. But what happens when a German small town girl like me lives in a huge city like Sydney? I am going to show you…
First impressions of Sydney: Part 2 – “Tourist invasion”
When I go out on the weekend to explore the city, I meet a lot of new people; French, Italians, Americans, Norwegians and Germans. I meet people staying only for a couple of days or staying for a couple of months. I hardly meet any Sydneysiders. I keep asking myself why that is the case?
One answer to my question could be that they do not visit the Opera House or clearly do not attend hop-on hop-off tours in their own hometown. But do they not go to concerts, dance at night clubs or stroll around the city either? So where do all the Sydneysiders hide? Do they only come out when the day light fades as some animal species do? When Sydney is not over run by tourists? But Sydney is popular among the visitors from all over the world for being a metropolis that never sleeps, so even the Sydneysiders do not have it to themselves at night.
Australians are known to be very welcoming and open but how must it be to share the city with hoards of tourists flooding it every day without any end in sight? Maybe the younger generation prefers to keep to themselves because they are a bit tired of making new friends, already having their return air ticket to their mother country waiting in their pockets.
Lets’ face it, I will make more German, French and American friends here than Australians, it is hilarious and a bit sad too. At least I have a couple of good reasons to go on another trip around the world now – some of them live in Europe, some in the United States.