San Francisco has its wooden bay windowed and finialed apartment houses, Los Angeles has its tiny-eyed, tile roofed stucco bungalows, and Chicago has its red brick workman’s cottages. Sydney’s residential streets are lined with small terraced houses, square, two storied and compact, often built shoulder to shoulder. Each has a second floor balcony with intricately decorated wrought iron rails that, combined with slightly peeling pale stucco, untrimmed trees and vines and tiny but overgrown front gardens, give the neighborhoods an air of romantic mystery similar to the New Orleans French Quarter. Terraced houses are apparently so common they’re considered banal by Australians, but to my foreign eyes they were pretty and exotic.

Another feature of Sydney we noticed on that first day’s walk are the rocks. Not the neighborhood called The Rocks, but massive, enormous rocks that seem to manifest themselves suddenly in the landscape. The slope next to you, when looked at carefully, turns out to be not earth, but solid stone, ridged and reddish and plainly the source of the older buildings. We walked through one of these urban boulders. A pedestrian tunnel had been drilled through it, and we passed through a mossy, damp cave. Midway through was a barely legible plaque honoring a past Sydney mayor.

The Australian accent we most frequently heard sounded to me like a sans serifed English accent, terse, jaunty, typically ending in a slight rise as though it were a question (some American southern accents do the same thing.) Double tees are sometimes substituted with glottal stops. “Forgo ^ en.” A few Australians sounded American until they hit a flat drawn out “aaaay.” “I went down to the gardens t’ daaaay.”

We spotted no koalas, no kangaroos, and no thick-legged men in khaki shorts and corked hats. We met nobody named Bruce. Nobody said “crikey.”

We did see lots of sunburn, joggers, and tousled blonde hair, and heard a lot of “g’daays,” and “mates.” If we so much as paused to look at our map, somebody would stop to help us, including, that evening, a trio of young people who emerged from one of the terraced houses in Darlinghurst and stopped to help the four middle-aged, obviously lost Americans standing nearby on the pavement. They were plainly on their way to a party. One girl was dressed as little orphan Annie, the other as an American Indian. The broad-shouldered, shaven headed young man with them who wasn’t in costume whipped out his Iphone and located our recommended restaurant for us. It had been closed for the past two years, but he did try.

The Sydney residents we met had the easygoing good nature of people who love their city and enjoy sharing it.