Coogee by day
Every iconic coastal city should have an equally iconic
beach to go with it. Miami has the Miami
Beach, Los Angeles has the Manhattan Beach, and Blackpool has the Blackpool
Pleasure Beach.
So what about Sydney?
Well the obvious answer would be the famous Bondi Beach. However since coming here I have heard mixed
reviews about Bondi Beach. The general
gist I got regarding Bondi was it is a nice looking beach but is very popular
with tourists and consequently is usually very overcrowded.
Luckily Sydney does have a few other less
well known beaches to offer and one of them is Coogee Beach.
The house* and I decided we would drop by Coogee beach for
the day.
*Referring to the gang of people living in the house, not the
house itself.
Our plan was to buy food and alcohol and have a barbeque on
the beach which is something I felt I had to do at some point whilst in
Australia. Before I arrived in Sydney
everyone I discussed Australia with mentioned barbeques. People seem to think that having barbeques is
a necessity of Australian life.
I believe this stereotype is a result of a popular TV advert
that ran back in the 1980s where you saw some old guy burn food on a barbeque
whilst inviting you to Australia and telling you how great it is. This advert used the tag line “put another
shrimp on the Barbie”.
Luckily you don’t even need your own here as it seems most
popular beaches in Australia come equipped with public barbeques for everyone
to use.
They are a good idea although they do have their issues, the
main one being there are never enough of them.
We arrived at Coogee beach around midday but it wasn’t until mid
afternoon that one of these public barbeques became free. But even then we had to share it with a small
group of locals and a large group of Koreans.
The second issue with these public barbeques is that they
don’t get very hot. I slapped on a few
Waitrose value burgers onto the small corner of the barbeque I managed to
occupy but it took a while before they started to sizzle. I think I would have been better off placing
my burgers on the bonnet of hot cars left out in the sun.
Overall Coogee beach is nice though, with its white sand and
clear blue waters. Since it was
September (Australian winter) it was too cold to venture into the water. I could imagine that during the heat of the
Australian summer Coogee beach would make an excellent retreat, especially when
everyone else is flocking to Bondi beach in their masses.
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| Everything you want from a beach. |
Coogee by night
On a separate occasion I was invited to attend a roof top
party with the house in Coogee. The
venue for this shindig was on the rooftop of a rather fancy hotel near the
waterfront called the Beach Palace Hotel.
Since buying alcohol at bars in Australia is usually very
expensive we made an early start and had many drinks at the house before setting
off.
I didn’t go into much detail about the town of Coogee last
time because the bus dropped us off right at the beach, but just like it’s
beach Coogee is clean and generally a nice place to be. Most of the streets here are lined with small
cafes and bars. It seemed the biggest
building in this small town was the Beach Palace Hotel.
The roof terrace was separated
into two areas, the area where the party was happening and another private area
for hire. The other area had been hired
out for a kid’s birthday party by some obviously wealthy parents. “How could they have a kid’s birthday party
and an adult rooftop party full of drunks, alcohol and loud music?” I thought to myself. Luckily the kid’s party was just ending when
we arrived.
We were amongst the first to arrive and I had that awkward
feeling of when you arrive at a party and no-one else has shown up. However it didn’t take long for the rooftop to
fill up with variety of colourful characters.
Say hello to my little friend
For this event I decided to bring my DSLR camera rather than
my compact. I was worried that I’d get
bored of having to carry the heavy camera around my neck all night and that
people would give me funny looks, but in the end I was really glad I bought
it. I was surprised how good of an ice
breaker the camera was, random people were just coming up to me wanting to talk
to me and have their photo taken.
I did
make it clear that I wasn’t the event photographer but they didn’t seem to
mind. It just seems people at parties
like to have their photo taken and I don’t really know why. Perhaps it is because they have spent ages on
their appearance and feel good about how they look, or maybe it makes them feel
important, or perhaps it was just because they were drunk.
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| Random people love their photos taken. |
Overall the roof top party was great. When I usually go out on nights out I always
end up in some converted basement with black walls sticky floors and annoyingly
loud music. But this was completely
different. I was on the rooftop of a
nice hotel watching the sun set over the Tasman sea.
Not only was I feeling good because I was at a good party, I
also felt a sense of achievement, a sense that I “had made it”. Moving to Australia was difficult at first, I
arrived in the not so nice area of King’s Cross a few months ago with a
suitcase and no friends. But now I was
living in the nice and upcoming area of Surry Hills, had a decent job and a
group of friends who I was at this awesome party with. Despite the noise party and all the drunken
people dancing, I felt a sense of peace within myself.
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| A better view than a basement wall. |
