Honeymoon Highlights: Sydney

Is our trip really over already? It sure is. It’s amazing how quickly a 20-day trip can fly by but still seem like a long and tiring journey at the same time. The crazy part is that Kyle and I haven’t even been married a month, but it feels like we’ve already seen so much of the world together, or at least so much of a tiny part at least.

So here’s a quick wrap-up of the last leg of our trip. First of all, Sydney is huge--a whopping 4.3 million people or so roam the city streets and surrounding neighborhoods. But the great thing is that it doesn’t really feel like a ginormous, crowded city outside of the main city center. It’s cozy, diverse, and delightful.

After a quick driving tour around the city with our group, we hopped off the bus to explore some of the quaint suburbs by foot, starting with the Paddington and Surry Hills areas. Oxford Street in Paddington is full of great local designer shops and boutiques, like Gorman, sass & bide, and World (all which I blog about and drool over in this post).

The streets were also pretty charming. I loved how well the buildings and old signage were preserved. I noticed this cute Unicorn Hotel sign and logo and snapped a quick one before realizing that it’s now a bar. It’s still really cute and the bar looked pretty hip.

I got a similar vibe after checking out this old building along Manly Beach. I love the color of the building and the fun typography.

Sydney has tons and tons of beautiful beaches along its coastline. In addition to Manly, we stopped off at Bondi Beach, one of the city’s most well known beaches and neighborhoods, just to take a peek at this tourist hot spot. It was pretty lovely, and we even spotted a small group of dolphins swimming close by.

I decided that I hadn’t had enough pastry on the trip, so we popped off at Bourke Street Bakery in Surry Hills to get our hands on some homemade lemonade and one of these macadamia nut sticky buns.

As for evening activities, we ate, a lot, and caught one stellar performance at the Opera House. I’ve always been a pretty big Nick Drake fan and Kyle was definitely familiar with and intrigued by his music, so we felt pretty lucky to catch a show featuring 10 or so artists performing a collection of his songs. Artists included Robyn Hitchcock, Vashti Bunyan, Lisa Hannigan, and then some. Each one was unique and different, and I loved hearing the various arrangements of Drake’s songs.

And I couldn’t get enough street art while we were away. We spotted this beautiful installation in between two buildings buried within the city center. The piece was called “Forgotten Songs” and it represented the various bird species that used to live and thrive in central Sydney before the Europeans settled there. The installation included recordings of the birds’ songs and you could hear each one as you stood under the cages. It was quite lovely and all the tourists passing by loved it.

And that’s a wrap. We had a beautiful time. When can we go back?

See what else we did throughout Australia in Melbourne and Cairns.