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I’m from the UK and this is what Christmas in Australia is like

Simon Calder’s Travel

The thing about Australia is that it’s just like Britain, except completely different. And if that sounds paradoxical, bear with me. So the Sydney suburbs could be Britain. Architecturally, there are similarities: the small parade of shops near where my son lives in Bronte are just like the row of shops in West Finchley in North London where I grew up. There are neatly manicured grass verges, we all speak the same language, and the sense of humour is just like being home.

But then it is all different. The soundscape is as different from the UK as possible. Screeching kookaburras are like nothing else, in fact any amount of birdlife: the ibises, exotic parrots, cockatoos are just species you do not see (or hear in Blighty). The flora and fauna is tropical. And as we all know Australia, with its plethora of deadly spiders, snakes, sharks and crocs, can be a dangerous place!

But at Christmas the sense of everything being the same but totally different is even more acute. The dissonance is off the scale. But we’ll return to that.

When you’re going to Australia for Christmas – or any other time for that matter – you have to work out the best route to go. We’ve always gone either via Singapore or the Gulf, but was interested to see that Turkish Airlines now fly from Istanbul to Sydney, and so we embarked on something we’d not done before: and that’s fly to Sydney with two stops as opposed to one. The additional brief stop is in Kuala Lumpur. But from next year, when the airline takes delivery of its A350-1000 aircraft, it will be a 17 hour non-stop flight from Istanbul to Sydney.

Sydney’s New Year firework display is enviable

Sydney’s New Year firework display is enviable (Getty Images)

Read more: The lesser-known region of Australia that the crowds haven’t discovered yet

If you’re of the view that all these international airlines are much of a muchness, with Turkish you need to think again. For a start on the flight we had a chef, who took charge of all the meal preparations. So there was a cabin crew in their smart uniform, and a chef with chef’s hat and all.

Now if you’re imagining scenes from The Bear or Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares it’s nothing like that. There are no flaming skillets or flaming tempers. But the food in business class is beautifully presented, served on an elegant trolley that makes it…

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