Hi there,
In today’s post I am going to tell you about my general experience after spending a month in Narrabeen, Sydney.
When we were in the cab I was horrified by the traffic and right at that moment I discarded Sydney as a possible place to live in the future.
I complain about the traffic in Porto, but in Sydney it is much, much worse. Seriously, I had never been in a place (let alone a first world place) that had traffic jams at all hours.
You would leave the house on a weekend at 6AM and there would be traffic. Same for going hiking to the national parks.
To give you an idea, 52km by car took us an hour and a half because of traffic.
In one month, only on Easter Sunday we reached our destination without encountering a traffic jam.
Also, the drivers are impatient and honk their horns all the time. It was much more pleasant to drive in Durham.
I expected it to be like Vienna, so I was surprised by so much noise from cars and motorcycles. In fact, there are the same number of motorized people as in Porto.
Here too most of the cars are those giant 4×4 pickup trucks like in the US.
Now let’s move on to the quality of the buildings.
Our building was next to a street where there was a constant flow of cars 24 hours a day. Added to this was the noise of the neighbors doing a thousand things, the noise of the community cars since the parking lots were right below our apartment, and the maintenance that was given to the outside area. In other words, there was a lot of noise and much more noise than I have in my house in Porto.
My surprise was that, when I closed the windows, I was left the same as they were of poor quality and did not insulate the outside noise at all.
I mentioned this to my friend who lives in Melbourne thinking that the poor quality of the windows was because the apartment we were in might be a low-income apartment.
My friend told me that this is the way all houses are and that in general, the quality of construction is lousy.
There is no acoustic or thermal insulation. In summer you die of heat and in winter you die of cold.
In the post of Narrabeen’s house you could already see all the nonsense that apartment had, and I thought that maybe in Australia it was not completely strange.
I was also impressed that every time we opened the windows it smelled like smoke or car oil. I was going with my first world expectations; I was expecting purity of air like we had in Durham or at least better than in Porto.
Sydney is a huge city and going anywhere for sightseeing took us at least an hour and a half.
Since everything is so far away, people tend to abuse the use of cars and that is why there is so much traffic.
If we had stayed the 3 months as we had originally planned, we would have had no shortage of things to see in Sydney.
Going from Narrabeen to Sydney impacted me because of the change from a place that is like a small beach town to a huge city.
The first time we visited Sydney, I found it dirty, noisy and even a bit chaotic because of the excessive amount of people everywhere.
My friend who lives in Melbourne told me that every time she visited Sydney, she found it dirtier and with more traffic.
Even so, the city has areas that are spectacularly beautiful.
One thing I love is that it has an infinite number of coastal walks. That is, hiking trails that you can do along the coast. I had not seen this in any other city.
The bad thing is that even on those coastal walks you couldn’t escape the noise.
Another thing I hated about Sydney is that in addition to the noise of traffic and motorcycles, there were helicopters passing by at all hours, especially during the weekend.
The first day I went sightseeing I was shocked because there seemed to be no Australians. It was 80% Asians, and the rest were immigrants from other countries.
We saw no native Australians either.
In the whole month I only saw one street vendor: an Asian who was downtown on a Sunday. People were amazed looking at him as if he was something exotic.
The second day we went to see what we had left of Sydney; we left the house at 6AM and there were the beautiful Australians I had expected to see from the beginning.
If you want to see beautiful people doing sports, you must be on the street between 6AM and 8AM.
That said, let’s talk about the Aussies.
I have never seen so many sporty people in my life. It is impressive that you are on the street at 6AM and there is a sea of people doing sports, when in the European countries where I have lived or visited, at 6AM you do not see anyone on the street.
I got the impression that all Australians have sport in their blood. We saw very few obese people.
When we went hiking, everything was full of people.
Just think that in Porto when we were hiking, we were alone and in Valencia you didn’t see practically anybody either and much less at the time we are used to doing it.
That’s why it was impressive for me to see all the parking lots of the national parks full and that at times there were even traffic jams on the hiking trails.
On the one hand, it was good because it is nice to see sporty people, but on the other hand I found it stressful.
It is admirable that people, regardless of their physical condition, get to the sites and walk whatever they must walk.
This doesn’t happen in Valencia or Porto where people don’t go if they can’t park at the door.
What I found most wonderful was to see people of 70 or 80 years old doing sports and in better physical condition than me. I had never seen this in any other country.
You saw people of advanced age hiking, running on the beach, swimming, cycling, and happier than anyone else.
Seeing that people have a life beyond work, that they can afford to go out on weekends, that they do sports, that they reach the age of 80 in great physical condition, makes you think of the excellent quality of life that Australians must have.
In Valencia and Porto, people in their 30s are already in pity because of their poor physical condition and how sick they are.
In addition, the people you see on the beaches of Sydney are at another level and have nothing to do with the horrors we saw on the beaches of Valencia.
Even so, there are people who do not have such a good time.
One of the nights we went to the supermarket, we were very sad because the cashier was a 70 or 80 year old lady who did not even coordinate her movements well anymore and we could not understand how that lady was not already retired. It broke our hearts.
Something I had seen on TikTok that is true is that Australians walk around barefoot everywhere, even inside shopping malls and supermarkets and for them it is cool.
We also found it funny that they go around like Americans always with a drink in their hand.
Australians are polite and very nice. People always approached us to talk and ask questions. If they saw us taking pictures, they asked if we had a blog; if they saw you in the national park, they asked you what route you had taken and even on the last day when we were waiting for the Uber with our suitcases, many people wished us happy travels.
This is something that has not happened to us in any other country.
As far as housing is concerned, Australia is also in crisis like the rest of the countries in the world. There is help for young people to buy a house, but the waiting list is endless.
Housing prices in Sydney start at 1 million dollars.
The salary you must earn to be able to buy a house in Sydney is almost 240,000 AUD per year.
According to what my friend told me, the best thing to do is to live in the suburbs because you have everything you need, and you don’t even have to go to the big cities.
We went through many of these suburbs and the houses were beautiful. However, what we saw in Maine was much more idyllic.
In Spain, for example, in the towns what you see are the horrible buildings that they started to build in the 60s.
This was also something very admirable. Outside the center of Sydney where you had the mega buildings like in any big city, there were only houses, and it was rare to find a building. The buildings you could see were at most 3 stories high.
The vegetation in Sydney reminded us of Costa Rica.
Almost everything is more expensive than in Portugal and Spain. Gasoline and used cars were cheaper.
One hour parking on the street costs 10AUD and the entrance to the national parks costs 12AUD. At the beach parking for the whole day was 40AUD.
Gym prices were an atrocity; it was about 4 times more expensive than what we paid in Portugal.
In the national parks and on almost all hiking trails dogs are forbidden as they scare animals away.
The food in the supermarkets was nothing special to us and the food we have in Europe is much better. I missed shopping at Lidl and Mercadona too much.
The good thing is that almost everything you buy in the supermarket is produced in Australia.
As soon as I arrived in Sydney, I logged on to Amazon to order my skincare and there was nothing of what I use. No Isdin, Sesderma or anything like that.
We found a website where they sold one product, but it was coming in three months and shipping was around 80AUD.
Fortunately, I had skincare from The Ordinary and used that until we got back.
My friend told me that if you normally reapply sunscreen every 3 hours, in Australia you must reapply every 30 minutes.
She also told me that people age very fast because they don’t properly protect themselves from the sun and look older than they really are.
The heat from noon onwards was unbearable, so most of the days of tourism, we left the house at 6AM and at noon we were already on our way back.
In addition to not being able to buy the products we normally used because they do not arrive in Australia, another thing that made our stay difficult was that the websites and social networks we used were not working properly, probably due to the lack of servers.
Sydney seemed to us a safe city, although we did not go out at night or move around in areas that could be unsafe.
I visited Australia with the expectation of a possible country to live in the future. I went with a utopian idea of a first world that I did not find.
That doesn’t mean that I didn’t like it or that I didn’t enjoy the trip, but I dismissed it as a country to live in.
For me the worst thing was the traffic and the noise (cars, motorcycles, helicopters passing by 24 hours a day); besides the excessive amount of people that you find everywhere when it was already low season.
While in Porto we have places and schedules in which in summer we can escape from the people, in Sydney there is no such possibility. Even on a weekday when we went at 6AM to see the sunrise at Narrabeen beach, it was full of people.
Being Sydney such a big city, it is shocking that there is no place or time when everything is not full of people.
The first week I had the feeling that I did not like Sydney because of the shock that caused me so much noise and so much traffic, but the impression improved as we visited these wonderful places and surely the rest of the country has even more to offer.
Expenses for the month:
- Flights: 3346,62 euros
- Transportation: 360,12 euros
- Restaurants: 94,7 euros
- Food + Amazon shopping: 319, 47 euros
- Travel insurance: 161 euros
- Ropa: 142, 3 euros
- Total: 4424,21 euros