Seeing Through New Eyes

I can say, I think (I hope!), that after living in Newcastle for 4 years now, with a cheeky stint overseas in between, that I am a local. I know backstreets better than some of my friends from the area, I can remember the names of my favourite cafés' baristas, I know where the best < $10 breakfasts are, and I know to steer clear of places that charge extra for sauce on your pub chicken schnitty. 

There are times, however, when the city is entirely new to me. It is moments when I see people enjoying it in ways that I have not that I think "man, where have I been?" A run along the foreshore, up along the breakwall and back along Shortland Esplanade, past Newcastle Beach and up along the stretch of road that winds around King Edward Park, had me seeing new sights that I hadn't seen before. More specifically, it had me seeing people using spaces that I had seen, walked through, or used, in new ways. A couple lazed around on a picnic rug in between the rushes and the road at the very bottom of King Edward with a bottle of red and a sunset behind them casting dancing hues across the water in front of them. People swam at the furtherest North point of Nobby's Beach hiding between the lighthouse and the start of the breakwall - an intimate yet on display setting where I had never think to swim or relax beside the ocean. 

All these new images of Newcastle, of experiences to have within it, shot beautifully through my mind from left to right, as if they were a dazzling, new night sky that I had never seen before. I literally stopped in the road, turning to a friend and saying "how come I have never thought to do this?" Its simplicity was a trigger for me. That I had been wasting my time on money-spending activity when the outside was calling. Where I could sit amongst flowers in a park like Alice, "in a world of my own". Where, at the end of the city, I could throw my body into the ocean. I realised that in this hectic busy life of constant connection with people, things to do, I  crave simplicity. I need this world of my own to function. To experience something differently. To experience the new, the unexplored, the fresh earth and the clean winds. 

A new Newcastle.