Letters from Sydney: Episode 1

Hello All!

Apologies to begin with, I am a tad too late with my accounts of the Sydney trip. As I got down to writing what and how my Sydney trip is faring I realized that the email was turning quickly into a novelish form... Cant help being a writer. So, what was meant to be one small email, turned out into 40 pages of a short novel. So i thought I would rather blog about my experiences, making this into a 10 part series.

This is the first letter from my 10 letters from Sydney.

Letters from Sydney
Episode 1:

Here I am sitting at my apartment, 66-A, Dalmeny Avenue, Rosebery, Sydney, NSW. What can be my address for the next 2 years is a very, very warm and cozy place. Owned by a 30ish Natalie Courtier, 66-A is a duplex, with a living room and kitchen taking up the ground floor, we, (David, Natalie, Sac and I) live on the first floor.

Natalie is a single mom. Caring, Helpful and lively with a brilliant sense of humor, she is just like most other Australians are. Always offering me what she has ‘managed’ to cook and dropping me to the supermarket in her beetlesque pink car, she is just the kind of person one would need to be with in the first, crucial week overseas.

David is the guy who has rented the second room. He landed in Sydney a week earlier than me and is here for 5 months to learn, well, English. He is a 6 ft. tall Columbian, speaks English as broken as broken can be, with spattering of Spanish, hoping, rather considering that Natalie and I understand each and every bit of it. David is the one who didn’t let me feel homesick, walking me through the neighborhood, helping me unpack and when the unpacking was not-so-nice, helping me pack again. Explaining to me the way traffic functions, how people in Sydney are reckless drivers n et al.

“Do you have a girlfriend back home..?” He asked me one day, out of the blue.
“No” I said, a little confused about what made him bring up the topic so suddenly.
“Oh!” David sighed, sympathizing with me like I had lost something of the magnitude of the battle of Troy, “I have a girlfriend in Columbia” he finished, rather sadly.
“That’s nice” I said, thinking that it would comfort him.
“Its not, really” he said, extremely pensively, looking down the wooden staircase, on which we were sitting. “I miss her. And. She misses me too.”

That did it. I knew that David had accepted me as a friend. When people tell us about their love lives, they just like us. When people tell us about the tragedies of their love lives, they trust us.

Apart from Natalie and David, the third mate in the house is Sac. A cute li’l white dog, Sac decided to like me right on the moment I stepped in the house with three very heavy suitcases almost at 7:30 p.m, Sydney time, on the 3rd of March 2007.

My Australian Voyage started on a tad negative note, with my flight being delayed for 3 hrs, and my luggage going overweight. But then those hours gave me a chance to talk on the phone, to friends, family, etc. That I couldn’t speak to more than one persons is a different story. That somewhere, deep inside, I didn’t want to speak to anyone else is a different story as well.

The flight, Qantas 124 was a very nice one. My first experience of a take off and a landing went quite smooth and I enjoyed the entire feel of it, not feeling any of the flight syndromes that I was made aware of a trillion times by a zillion people. I felt a weird combination of euphoria and sadness when I saw Bombay from the sky, the lights forming a kaleidoscope of the dream city. It’s kind of strange; I was going to one city for 2 crucial years of my life so that I could comfortably live in another for the rest of my life.
“I am going to own this city one day”, I said to myself as the flight zoomed ahead, leaving behind a trail of Bombay lights.

The thought just transported me to a dream I had once seen. I was standing at Worli sea face, wearing a white shirt and a pair of blue denims. I must be a bit older than what I am now. Standing besides me was someone, wearing a blue-pink dress. It was raining, rather, drizzling steadily, the drops of water jumping off the roof of a black Skoda Superb parked right besides where we were standing.

“I am going to own this city one day”, I said looking at the vast expense of Bombay in front of my eyes.

“You already do”, she said, smiling and then holding my hand. I could feel the touch of the diamond she was wearing in her finger. We then just looked at each other and laughed our hearts out. She always laughed for no apparent reason. This time, maybe she cracked a genuinely funny joke.

Dreams always say something, someone had once told me. I don’t know what this dream meant, but I would seriously like to know. A dream consists of a figment of fiction and figment of reality. It’s when the two figments are the same, that’s when dreams come true.

I was so fast asleep that I didn’t understand when I was thousand of miles from the place I called home. The flight QF 124, landed at the Sydney airport at the scheduled time which was 5 p.m. Sydney time.

I got through the customs with no problems at all. I was awed by the beauty of the Sydney Airport. Walking through terminal 2, I was just thinking about the whale of difference between Bombay and Sydney airports, the way people spoke, the way everybody spoke and interacted with each other. The number of smiles I exchanged with strangers at the Sydney airport in those 20 minutes was easily equal to the number of stranger smiles I had exchanged in the whole of India in 20 years. Somehow, I wasn’t feeling homesick. I was feeling terrifically at home, as I walked towards the cab, to head on towards a place I was going to call home for the next two years, 66-A, Dalmeny Avenue, Rosebery, Sydney, NSW.


To be continued


I sincerely hope my writing hasnt lost whatever bit of flair it had, have written something after a long, long time. Hope I was successful in keeping you guys engaged and give you a first person's view of my first few days in Sydney.

I would make an effort to update this blog every saturday. So all those of you who didnt leave part 1 midway can come back next saturday to check out more of these letters from Sydney.

Coming up next week: The International Film School of Sydney, I miss home everytime I see an aeroplane, Dip Insight and What happened when a set came crashing down....

This and more... only in My letters from Sydney.