Yaz Kassisieh to visit every Sydney suburb, completing 66 in 12 months

Have you ever wondered about how many suburbs there are in Sydney? Yaz Kassisieh has. And he’s crossing all 650 all a list and documenting the entire journey.

Yaz Kassisieh has an ambitious aim to visit every suburb in Sydney and write about it. Pictures: Angelo Velardo

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With his headphones in and Opal card ready, Yaz Kassisieh hits the streets each weekend as part of his ambitious plan to visit every suburb in Sydney.

The 27-year-old business analyst started the Completing Sydney blog in 2018 with the aim of encouraging people to explore their own towns.

“When you think about it, you go travel overseas and you walk around — you go to university campuses, you go to temples and you do all this stuff — and then you come home and you kind of sit in your own little area and you don’t explore,” he said.

Yaz during a weekend visit to Parramatta for an upcoming suburb profile.

Kassisieh, who grew up in Dundas and The Hills, starts his weekend by planning a route on Google maps and then hits the streets.

“I take the train out with about six hours of podcasts and start walking around,” he said.

Since July he has visited more than 50 suburbs.

“On a pretty reasonable day I can cover 10km and by the end I’m completely destroyed; but for me, that’s also kind of the fun of it,” he said.

At the end of 2018 he released the Golden Ibises awards, highlighting the best and worst of his visits from giggle-inducing names to the best food and multiculturalism.

One of his favourite suburbs is Fairfield Heights, which he says is underrated.

“There were restaurants, sweet stores with a giant pyramid full of baklava … you see this sort of thing and think, ‘This is kinda cool, if I was overseas I’d say this is a cool area to check out’ but because it’s western Sydney no one thinks, ‘oh I’ll go check out Fairfield Heights’,” he said.

With about 650 suburbs in Sydney, Kassisieh has a long road ahead.

“As a back of the napkin calculation … if I’m posting two suburbs a week and there’s 650 that takes six years,” he said.

“… I’m going to keep doing it as long as I can, as long as people are interested and reading it and I’m enjoying it.”