After four weeks in Asia, we've now been in what one might consider more familiar terrain here in Sydney for a good five days. Both Lauren and I were indeed looking forward to travelling to a country where we would have the benefit of English being the primary language - and we did enjoy our time in Sydney.

Climbing to the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge with magnificent views of the city and the Sydney Opera in particular was a breathtaking experience; the excellent tour through the Opera building itself turned out to be equally fascinating and rounded out the highlights of our stay in addition to a visit to the local Koala park with our friend Andrew and his mom (Kangaroo petting zoo included!!!).

Much to our surprise, though, coming back to "western" culture has been a revelation of a bit of a different kind - while riding on the city trains in Sydney was not an unpleasant experience by any means, I found myself thinking back to similar trips in places like Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo or Kyoto where the stations and trains had been absolutely impeccably clean - so much so that coming to a city with a less perfect standard in terms of cleanliness of the public transport system took a bit of adjusting. In addition, the almost permanent presence of some sort of graffiti on houses, trains or any other given structure gave a rather stark contrast to the Asian countries where graffiti had been entirely absent as far as I can recall - a fact I now appreciate even more.

The other surprise was that we've found Australia so far to be a couple of notches down from places like Japan or Hong Kong in terms of courtesy and friendliness, at times almost bordering on rudeness. There have been of course some notable exceptions, e.g. the people we met at Andrew's church as well as a couple of the tour guides, but overall we haven't been too impressed so far in this regard. But then again, one would probably find any place to be impolite in comparison to Japan........

At the moment, Lauren and I are headed for Airlie Beach where we will board a sailing boat tomorrow for a two-day trip around the Whitsunday Islands. After six weeks of travelling, this will be a real break with nothing to do other than sunbathing, swimming, snorkeling, eating and.......sleeping I guess. :-)