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About Sydney
It was perhaps the Olympic Games in 2000 which placed Sydney definitively among the ranks of world-class cities. In advertisements Sydney quite rightly calls itself "sunny, sexy and sophisticated". The old colony for deported convicts has been transformed into one of the world's hottest capitals, where the Opera House is just one of many attractions.
It is almost inconceivable that it is just over 200 years since the British started building a colony for deported convicts in Sydney. Today this prison colony is a metropolis and a multiethnic magnet for people from around the world. Sydney Harbour is like an embracing arm of the ocean, and it is hard to imagine a more beautiful location for a city. Because detached living is so popular here, Sydney is very spread-out.
The City, or the Central Business District, CBD, is however compact. This is the area in front of the Circular Quay with the Opera House and the historic Rocks, where the gleaming glass and steel buildings of the business quarter reach skyward. Kings Cross houses a distinctive mix of worldly pleasures on the one hand and good restaurants and low-cost housing on the other.
The inner-city suburbs to the east of the City, like Darlinghurst and Paddington with its long Oxford Street, have some of the best shopping, pubs and entertainment's and are known as relaxed, gay and free from prejudice. North of Sydney harbour, on the North Shore, lies Manly with its restaurants and beach life. Glebe is another, student-dominated "inner suburb". In fashionable Double Bay (also known as Double Pay...) the houses are expensive and the shops exclusive. The opposite is to be found, among other places, in Redfern, poor and largely populated by aborigines, who are more or less invisible in Sydney's more affluent areas.
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