10+1 SIGNS OF THE AUSSIE SUMMER
It’s January and at least 30 degrees right now – kind of weird, but we’re getting used to the concept of the Australian “summer in winter”. We’re sitting under our beach tent - an essential part of every beach kit - looking at the white sand, the surfers and the swimmers in the wavy, emerald green ocean of Byron Bay. Time has well passed since our last post and the happenings have blown us with them. But here we are again, and there’s a lot we need to catch up on! This is the first of a series of updates with the adventures and insights of the Aussie life and the numerous travel destinations we discovered recently: the picturesque Hunter Valley wine region to the North of Sydney; the holiday destination of Port Stephens with its stunning beaches; the Kangaroo Island in Western Australia which is also called the “Australian Galapagos” due to its unique fauna; Pittwater Bay by a private motor yacht and the world-famous hippy beach town, Byron Bay for a real chilled-out camping break. More details to come in our upcoming posts.
The past few months have gone by in a flash, with plenty of activities to keep us busy during the week and over the weekends too. As a sign that we’ve properly settled in, Szilveszter has started cycling to work across the Harbour Bridge to get some more consistent exercise (25-30 minutes each way, but very hilly!), and Renata has started a new job as well. Her attempt to cycle the 15 km distance to work, sadly, ended up with a broken pedal in the middle of a barely inhabited spot in Sydney and then at the repair store, so this challenge remains on the bucket list. We have continued our discovery trips across the region over the weekends, often with our new friends, Casey and Norman, and we never stop gaining new experiences and learning more about locals and our new home.
Since our last post, summer has also well and truly arrived in Sydney, and the country switched itself into the Christmas festivities already in late October – since this period is also the biggest summer holiday season for Australians. This brought some additional joyful and fun facts into our everyday lives, and it gave us some insights into the Aussie lifestyle which are worth sharing. So how could you tell in Australia that the holiday season and summer was coming up?
The Queen Victoria Building (QVB) shopping center in full Christmas swing
1. People took life even easier than normally. Based on anecdotes from European friends and the limited but condensed experience of our own, we can say that, generally, offices are deserted by 5.30pm at most companies. But at the end of the year this reaches extreme levels: It’s not uncommon to leave the office at 11am to attend Christmas lunches with clients, and simply never make it back! It’s also getting frequent to decide at 1pm on the Friday afternoon – just after returning from an hour lunch break – that actually, you might as well just call it a day, since it’s Friday afternoon! This pattern was recognizable in other fields of life too: a friend of ours wanted to get his car fixed in the beginning of December, but he was told at the mechanic that due to the Christmas period the earliest opportunity his car could be first looked at was the end of Jan – who knows by when will it be fixed then?! But “Hey, don’t worry, it’s all good”. We definitely did not miss the office craziness and stress of the pre-Xmas period we’re used to.
2. The period of Christmas is very much linked to the summer holiday which normally starts straight after Xmas and end sometime during January – often once the school holiday finished at the end of Jan. As a common tradition, many families go camping with a larger group of relatives, and the best campsites get filled early on in preparation for this period. Consequently, the price of flights and accommodation at the most popular destinations skyrockets, which made it an exciting challenge for us to find some good travel options which didn’t cost twice as it would outside peak season. Discussions on public transportation and in the office are heavily focused on sharing holiday plans!
3. Summer = ice cream and fruits! Grocery stores are packed with the joys of the summer season: ice-cream and tasty fresh fruits like mango (there’s an 8-month season here!), peaches and cherries, so Szilveszter feels like Christmas every day! We have consumed more ice-cream in a few weeks than over 3.5 years in London, and we often spend a considerable time in front of the fridges in store to choose from the way-too-many options when replenishing our stocks. By the way, did you know that they sell watermelon here without the black seeds? It looks a bit weird at first, but it’s easy to get used to good changes.
4. Just like Szilveszter is excited about the ice-cream, Renata loves the blooming trees that have arrived with the summer! First the city got covered in the purple blanket of Jacaranda blossoms at Spring, then the sweet fragrance of Frangipani trees pampered our senses. It’s the main season for a number of variations country-wide - white, pink and orange -, and the trees seem to be an essential part of most gardens. We associate its perfume with exotic holiday destinations, like Cyprus or Bali where we smelled it before, hence it smells like we were on holiday every day!
5. Santa Claus has delivered our presents into our shiny sandals this year! According to Hungarian traditions (and a few other countries’ in Europe) Santa brings you a pack of fruits and sweets by the 6th December morning (well, if you were good the year before), hence you need to shine your boots the night before for him to place your pack in there. We kept the tradition in Sydney this year but had to swap the boots this year, since we don’t have them – which also meant that we didn’t have to do any shoe-shining the night before! As a slight variation to the traditional chocolates and candies, this year Santa brought exotic fruits (at least to Renata).
6. It got real hot. The temperature hits 30 degrees by 08:00am, and climbs to 35 by early afternoon, and locals tell us the peak is yet to come after Christmas… But even when it’s 25 degrees, it agreeably feels more than that – maybe due to the stronger sun? Now even Renata’s work soccer team matches at lunch break can only be played after applying significant amount of sun lotion on each player, and the 26-minute matches sometimes seem like an eternity on the artificial grass field – not just for foreigners.
7. Christmas parties held at each corner – literally! One weekend there was a special festive celebration for dogs(!) in the park next to our house, with Santa, elf and Rudolf costumes and hats on each dog! We were having our Sunday afternoon chill-out in the park when we realized that 50 or so dogs surrounded us in their costumes, and they clearly enjoyed looking special. The owners made a social get-together out of the event with blankets, camping chairs and the inevitable booze, and they even prepared Christmas gifts for dogs which were then mixed and re-distributed as a surprise present. We had a good time watching this funny crowd and receiving lots of interest from the dogs, right until the moment when one of them decided to mark our picnic blanket as his own, followed by a couple of other ones too, just to make sure they can also get a piece from it, I guess… This park is popular for dog walking and the owners make friends with the friends of their dogs – weird, but I guess this is a variant of when people make friends with their children’s friends’ parents, right?
Christmas dog party with photo booth in our park - It might be the best present for Grandma!
8. Similarly to the UK where there’s excitement and a huge competition each year between retailers to produce the best Christmas TV advertisement – which seems to have a large impact on sales -, the season for these ads are important in Oz too. Instead of the snowy landscape and fireplace, however, the ads here represent what Christmas is like Down Under: barbeque, beach, hot days and swimming pools spiced with glazed ham, sea food and pavlova, the indispensable Christmas meringue, which is only authentic if served with berry fruits! These ads give a funny summary of the local celebration in the festive period. As suspected, the traditional Christmas meal is not turkey or fish here like in Europe but ham with sweet, mainly honey and spice-based glazing, which might be served cold with bread and salads, or served with steamed vegetables when warm.
Ham with Christmas glaze & bacon and berry pavlova
9. With summer the BBQ season has been kicked off too! This means long queues at the most popular beaches for the public open-air ovens and the smell of sausages and beers literally at every possible green spot in town. No balcony can be too small for a BBQ in Sydney, and people mean it! We got food envy (and also got fed up by the long queues for the public facilities) so our Christmas present from Szilveszter’s family was our own shiny BBQ which can’t wait to get inaugurated! The only challenge left is now the regular fights with kookaburras, seagulls and other birds who are well prepared to fly off with the best pieces of your meat at the most unexpected moment.
BBQ in Tunks Park
10. But here is the best for guys: the bikini season is booming too! An interesting fact that, although the beaches are packed with BBQ sauce-coloured girls in tiny bikinis - who clearly spend the best of their time on the sun -, it turns out that most of them are foreigners as locals tend to wear long sleeves and be much more careful! Despite the caution, however, every 3rd long-term Sydney-sider develop skin cancer at some point due to the harmful sun rays. Actually, as a preparation for the corporate Xmas parties, the girls in the office used artificial self-tan lotions instead of involving the sun in the process, which is a very popular and is considered much ‘healthier’.
Balmoral beach on a weekday
+1. Choosing destinations for our regular weekend trips now also has to consider whether we want to hike in 30 degrees (along the coast) or in 20 degrees (in the mountains). The last period had a number of examples for both, and we’re proud that by now we’ve discovered several treks in the vicinity of Sydney in all directions! Here are a few of our favourite experiences recently:
Northern Beaches
A few weekends ago we rented a car and explored the Northern beaches area: as you head North from Sydney, you are met with suburb after suburb sitting on beautiful beaches, and a lot of people move out here once they have a family and need more space, or simply want a better lifestyle in exchange for a longer commute. In this day of beach-hopping, we stopped by the large stretch of Dee Why beach, and then at Avalon Beach for a swim in the rock pool. An Australian curiosity at the beaches is the concept of the rock pool: to protect people from the waves and the wildlife, and possibly also to warm the water a little, the sides of beaches frequently have concrete pools, which are filled with seawater from the waves. Being a confined space, it is slightly warmer than the ocean (but still a quite chilly 20-22 degrees). This was Szilveszter’s first true beach swim of the season in November, but Renata decided to wait until the water got a bit warmer… We must admit it was a very strange feeling chilling on beach and thinking that we have the possibility to do this every weekend – rather than just as part of a normal holiday! Our final destination was Palm Beach, located on a narrow and long peninsula with almost no houses but with a long pure natural beach. While having a casual picnic on the beach, we couldn’t believe our eyes when we saw a pod of dolphins making a leisurely journey across the bay, only 100m or so from the shore! We’ll surely return!
Dee Why beach and rock pool
Trekking in the Kuring-gai National Park
We met with our friends Norman and Casey a few weeks ago to do a hike in the Kuring-gai National Park, North from Sydney. Most trips require a car to get into the national park, but this is accessible by train at both ends, so we had to check it out! Despite being a “Level 4” hike, the only real difficulty was the heat... The hike took us down to the banks of the Hawkesbury River, where besides the beautiful views of hilly river-side with lush forest, we saw plenty of motor- and sailboats and swimmers in the emerald water. We certainly felt a bit jealous, as the shore was rocky and there were no good places to get in the water, but this gave us the idea to rent a boat on Pittwater bay, the area around this national park once Renata’s parents visited us over Xmas. Norman also had a tempting idea of doing the Great North Trail from Sydney to Newcastle, but it would probably have to be done in segments, since the total distance is 250km – or maybe one day we can beat the current record of 55 hours! If it happens, you can rest assured that you will first read about it here.
In our upcoming posts, as mentioned in the beginning of this one, we’ll share with you the highlights of the numerous trips we made in the Christmas break, a very active range of discoveries of 3 weeks! So stay tuned, we're coming back soon!