A Tennessee Girl in Oz: Aroma Festival

Sunday was a gorgeous winter Sydney day, which was lucky because it was also Aroma Festival, a coffee festival held down in The Rocks.

Sydney people really love their coffee. But they're also really picky about it. Which means that instead of 5 or 6 Starbucks in the city, there's 1 Starbucks and about 200 tiny little coffee shops tucked into alleys and hanging off the ends of restaurants. Everyone has their own opinion about which coffee place has the best, and people stay loyal to their favorite places.

So the Aroma Festival was packed with people! But I didn't mind, because everyone was out enjoying the weather and coffee and generally happy to be alive.

The booths of the Aroma Festival were scattered around The Rocks in clumps of tents. I couldn't really figure out an organization to the arrangement, but it didn't really matter.

There were lots of coffee tents (with really long lines), but just as many tents for other things like tea, cupcakes, chocolate, churros, spices, coffee machine demonstrations, etc.

There were also several bands scattered around, all playing really good music. This one band played jazzy-style music on top of a coffee truck. It was so charming!

I met a couple expat girls at the festival, and we unanimously agreed the coffee truck with the band on top was where we wanted to get coffee. And it also happened to have the shortest line. =)

After we had our coffee, cupcake, and cookie break, we walked over to check out the coffee artwork. The "art" was a mosaic made of coffee cups, filled with coffee of different dilutions to make shading. Last year the portrait was of Marylin Monroe, I learned from the Aroma website. This year, we couldn't make out who it was, Google tells me it's Dame Edna.

Even though I couldn't tell who it was at the time, it was still really cool to watch it come together.

Even though the main focus of the day was coffee, there plenty of other things going on too. Like tea readings.