Sydney

I am off to Sydney today and tomorrow for work, a 3 hour round trip on a train.  I find these days really draining, I have to get up early and I get home so late and my routines and health approaches I have been working on recently get pushed aside for too much coffee and crap take away.  And no physical exercise expect for a pushy, polluted, 10 minute walk underground from the train station to the office.  

I have a love/hate relationship with this place.  When I lived there even though it was more a love relationship, I still felt uncomfortable and had this feeling deep down that I didn't belong.  I used to be so proud to let anyone know I was "Sydney Born & Bred".  Now I just keep that to myself unless someone really wants or needs to know. 

Even though we have broken up, she isn't out of my life completely just yet.  Aside from the occasional work commitments, my entire family is there.  And being only an hour by car we have been seduced to head South for a day, sometimes even a weekend.  It won't be for another 5 years until we are able to truly break away.  

We hear a lot up here about the "housing crisis" in Sydney, apparently the only way is up now, and modern living will be in apartments.  I look around here to see the small farms, with their chickens or stud cattle or fruit and veg greenhouses slowly disappear to make way for more housing.  Not units but small blocks for a decent size house and a strip of yard.  There is another way up here, but it is also a reminder that this is not our "forever place".  In fact now that I consider myself a true local, most locals now fear that the place is turning into Sydney and I couldn't agree more, I can already start to feel the discomfort return.