Impressions of Sydney

Sydney is Australia's oldest, largest and most diverse city (this is pretty much the first thing that all the guidebooks tell you). Here are a few tips for your first visit.

• The people are friendly and helpful, especially if you are used to somewhere a little more reserved, like London (where you can go days without speaking to anyone, if you choose).
• Sydney, still a relatively young city, is blessed with two internationally famous landmarks - the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. Both can be inspected at close range, either by climbing (the bridge - best done on a clear day) or by a guided tour (the Opera House - best done on a damp, overcast day). The Harbour provides the backdrop for most of the tourist activities in the city so it's worth exploring by ferry or on foot (around the edges, obviously).
• The food and drink are expensive, even from the skewed perspective of someone who lives in London, and visitors should prepare themselves for bar bills of Scandinavian proportions. In Sydney the beer will be good but £7-8 a pint (Fat Yak Pale Ale is worth trying, if you can find it). Main courses in decent restaurants start at around the £14 and head rapidly higher but bargains can be found if you're prepared to shop around.
• Navigation is easy because Sydney is laid out on a grid, a style of town planning apparently favoured by most modern cities. This is a boon to the visiting tourist but means the city lacks some of the charm of older European cities, like Rome or Paris. 
• Sydney seems to prefer new to old, meaning that much of downtown Sydney is modern and shiny. Older buildings can sometimes be found crouching timidly between the skyscrapers or incorporated into their lower floors (the city is confident enough to retain some of the old to balance the brash thrusting of the newer towers) but the centre of town is dominated by soulless glass towers that you might see in any large city.
• With the grid layout comes, almost inevitably, an over reliance on the internal combustion engine. Cars and buses crowd the streets and an almost total lack of other transport options make Sydney a somewhat grim place for pedestrians. Heavy traffic and lots of walkers (there are, strangely, almost no bicycles and very few motorbikes) make for crowded pavements and tricky road crossings (although the traffic moves so slowly that you generally don't need to wait for the crossing lights to change).
• The weather, which was supposed to be warm and sunny in November when I visited, is becoming more changeable and less reliable. Some of the locals put this down to global warming but the appetite for change (for example by curbing car usage) seems limited. 

Sydney is a great place to visit with friendly locals and plenty of things to see and do, especially if you like surfing or other beach/water activities. Highly recommended if you're in the area.