The perfect city

A Sydney cabbie asked us where we were from. "San Francisco? Our twin city!" he remarked at our answer.

Sydney and SF are often compared to one another; both are scenic coastal towns with similar cultural and culinary scenes (and iconic bridges, of course). I’m not sure this is entirely fair to Sydney: At its heart, San Francisco is still a shabby frontier town, no matter how expensive it gets or how respectable it pretends to be. Sydney, on the other hand, is strangely perfect. The city is safe, clean, modern and sprawling, with pleasant contemporary architecture, good infrastructure, and determinedly cheerful inhabitants. It’s scorching hot in the summer (that would be January), and there’s an almost complete lack of graffiti or panhandlers. It’s Scottsdale with a harbor.

Sydney is pretty quiet for a city of four million--most businesses and retail outlets close up around 5pm. Sydneysiders, though, treat themselves to one night a week to stay out 'late': stores are open till 9pm on Thursdays.

I can’t offhand think of two cities that are more different from each other than Mumbai and Sydney; Jacqueline and I experienced some real culture shock in flying directly from the former to the latter. In Sydney we were thrilled with the novelty of being able to drink tap water and eat food without getting violently ill, and relieved at the general ease of life here. But the calm and cleanliness and efficiency of Sydney seem…well, colorless. And empty. I felt like an ingrate for not appreciating it or embracing it.