My weather widget just reminded me that it’s one of the rare times of the year, when the temperature in Sydney and Vienna are the same. At least unlike last year on 20 May it’s not colder in Vienna than in Sydney.

It’s been colder the last week here in Sydney and you can already feel autumn settling down and preparing the town for winter. The sunset seems to be different at this time of the year and it’s pretty early, civil twilight currently ends at 7:18pm, although it’s still quite warm at that time, compared to autumn in Austria that is. But after a rainy easter weekend we finally had sun and blue sky during the day this weekend – perfect weather for the beach! Only the water was much colder than it used to be.

Here’s the local forecast for this week, according to my Apple weather widget. It’s still really warm during the day, although it gets fresh in the nights.

I’m a bit late with this, but I still wanted to post some pics from my new year’s eve here as well. We (that’s me, my ex-flatmate Daniel and one of his friends) went to circular quay first to meet some English friends. The place was already crowded, though it was around 6 pm (see pic below) and the spot that our friends inhabited didn’t offer a really good view, since it was behind some trees, just beneath the harbour bridge.

We therefore decided to move to another spot and took a ferry (you can take a ferry with your regular bus ticket) to Rose bay, from where we went further east towards Watsons bay. It was a nice walk along the coast and we ended up at a spot, which offered a great view on the city center, the opera house and the harbour bridge (see pic above). There were quite a few people, but it wasn’t too crowded. It was nice, since we were sitting on some stones, right next to the water. It felt a bit unusual to celebrate New Year’s in t-shirts, but not as strange as it felt during christmas.

The fireworks were very impressive, but maybe a bit too distant. The pics that I took are actually from the 9 pm firework, which was good, because I was still enough focussed to handle my camera and the mini tripod at that time. :) I tried to take some pics of the major fireworks as well, but they got all blury. Check out this flickr page for the entire experience!

Right, it’s christmas today! :) It’s kind of difficult to develop the right mood for christmas, when it has 20+ degrees outside. Nevertheless, Australians are as enthusiastic about christmas as the rest of the world. During the last days, there were as many people on the streets, doing their last-minute christmas shopping, as you’d expect. There are also christmas trees everywhere in town, though they’re made of plastic, which adds to the awkward taste, like a Disney-version of christmas or so.

In fact, some Australians seem to be even more serious about the seasonal celebrations than people back at home. Most busses are covered with christmas decorations, some bus drivers even wear christmas hats, and people are singing christmas songs in the busses and trains. Last Saturday night in Kings Cross there was a car passing by, decorated like it was taking part in a who-has-the-best-christmas-decoration competition, as we know it from american television (could have been from “Hör mal wer da hämmert”). It was really difficult to recogize the car itself below all these decorations.

My initial plans to spend christmas day at the beach doesn’t seem to work out, since it’s been cloudy all morning and the sky doesn’t look like the weather would change soon. Damn, again I won’t get to see the beach.