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Don't be guiri!
Sydney, Australia.
The most authentic thing in Sydney is how they celebrate Christmas Day. The 25th of December, in the morning, you can see everybody waiting for the bus to go to the beach, wearing a swimsuit and a Santa Claus hat. Although what they really like is to brag about the last night of the year, so much so, that they even created a brand: the NYE (New Year’s Eve). Thousands of people come from all over the world to Australia to be the first ones to celebrate the New Year and see the fireworks from the Harbour Bridge, one of their beaches, or parks. One week before the event, the Tourist Office organizes seminars to explain how to manage all the hustle and bustle that take place those days. The first suggestion was priceless: “if by noon you don’t have a good location to see the fireworks, you can go back to your hotel room and watch them on TV”. With that, as with everything else, they were exaggerating. Following their advice, we found a good location in a little creek and we went there 10 hours before the show, with our cooler and our take-away-sushi. It was not until 5 minutes before midnight that people started to arrive with no rush. As I said before, much ado about nothing.
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Sydney, Australia.
Australia is a country on sale but nobody seems to be interested in buying it. On the north and on the south, houses and stores, everything is on sale. And the strange thing is that the ones that have the “For Sale” sign are not the ruinous business or the dilapidated houses, but the most luxurious flats located in the best areas. Apart form the crisis, the reason for so many businesses to be for sale is that here, everybody wants to be successful to leave. Just like everybody wants to leave, nobody wants to come in, not even the Third World country immigrants. Only a few Chinese people in Sydney, and that’s it. That’s why everything is so expensive in Australia. Since they don’t have cheap labour to cover the most basic services or the most simple professions, maids and waiters are people like us, locals who get their hands dirty in exchange for a salary that, without being anything special, it would be a fortune for a Filipino. The exception is a couple of Europeans working in fashionable bars to learn English, but the rest of them are just a bunch of modern Cocrodile-Dundees. Very chic, but also very embittered.
