Gorgeous day. Red lippie. Bazinga.
Tag: sydney
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The Ten Best Bookstores in Sydney
The Ten Best Bookstores in Sydney. Five of those are within walking distance of my house, and a couple more on on the way to work. I like that.
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Sydney Tilt-Shift Video
Wow. This tilt-shift video of Sydney is FANTASTIC. I really like the music too. It’s just lovely. I spoke to our company photographer Stu about how it was done. (He knows the guy who did it.) Stu’s of the opinion that it’s actually “fake” tilt-shift (i.e. done in post-production). Still, it looks GORGEOUS.
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Brewery Photo
They’ve started tearing down the old Kent Brewery a few blocks away, and every night I try to peek over the hoarding on my way home to catch a glipse. It looks so eerie and fantastic, like someone demolishing Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. The only tall bit still standing is the large chimney. Check out this awesome photo…
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Flemington Markets
Last week Eva kindly invited me to accompany her, Steph, and Kathleen to Flemington Markets on Saturday. I’d been to Paddy’s in Chinatown before, but this is the big market out near Homebush. It was INSANE. Hundreds of stalls with people selling fruit and veggies by the boxload, and it was all incredibly cheap. Bananas for $1/kilo. Whole crates of apples for $5. A one-kilo bag of peeled garlic for $2. We rented a cart and started piling stuff up. A couple hours (and one cramped car trip) later, we pulled it all out in Steph and Eva’s garate to divvy up. For less than $20, I ended up going home with apples, bananas, plums, mandarins, a pineapple, a pomelo, beans, coriander, cherry tomatoes, purple sweet potato, asparagus, the aforementioned bag of garlic, and nine(!) bulbs of fennel. So of course, now we’re cooking everything in bulk and stocking up the freezer for winter…
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High-Res Google Maps
Snookums pointed out to me last night that Google Maps has been updated with super high-res pictures of Sydney. Check it out. They obviously flew over before we moved last November, because that’s our picnic table in the backyard of the old place!
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CUB Site Plans
Looks like things are happening over at the brewery site again..
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Jet Boat
Well, my friend Sal finally made it back to the States and today she sent me a link to our photos from jetboating. Check ’em out!
We’re the goonies sitting in the back row of the boat. Oh, and if you’re wondering why everyone else is in red and we’re not? Because they’re wearing ponchos. WUSSES! Sal and I rocked it hardcore and got soaked in the process. I highly recommend the ride if you ever visit Sydney. It’s not that scary and you do get to see a lot of the harbour. Just get the 30 minute short ride though; that’ll be enough!
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Maritime Museum
While everybody else was moaning about the heat yesterday, the Snook and I decided to get out of the house and enjoy it. We headed down to Darling Harbour to visit the Maritime Museum, which we chose on the basis of two criteria: 1) we’d never been there, and 2) it’s currently free. We walked over from Chippendale and soon discovered a Japanese Festival happening in Tumbalong Park. I took some photos…
Along with the usual array of food stalls and travel booths, the Festival featured lots of visiting Japanese performers drumming and dancing onstage. We joined the crowd, and I snapped this picture of some Samarai dudes coming out of the VIP tent.
This act featured about fifty of these dancing girls along with a lot of drummers. The traditional dance was related to the rice paddies and featured a lot of movements of the workers.
Down at the harbour foreshore, some of the “less-polished” groups were performing. We stood to watch this troop of, uh, older Japanese ladies. They were dressed like very sparkly Golden Girls and I swear for the first sixteen bars of their song they were all doing the Robot.
The Maritime Museum had a “Pirates” thing going on for the kids over Spring Break, so here’s the Snook doing his pirate imitation. (I wanted to pay the extra $7 for the Pirates, but upon further inspection it was basically a pirates-themed kids’ playground. So we gave it a miss.)
The museum itself – to be honest – isn’t super engaging. They’ve got the world’s fastest speedboat, along with a few interesting things they’ve brought up from shipwrecks. The one section where I learned the most was on immigration. I had no idea that they basically coerced British parents into signing away their kids so they could be brought out here to “inject some good British stock” into the gene pool. This was back during the White Australia policy, when the white folks were worried they needed to “populate or perish.” Another phrase from this time was Ten Pound Pom. This referred to the scheme – advertised in this poster – that assisted Brits in moving here for only ten quid.
They’ve got a lighthouse! It was from up the coast and they moved the whole thing down here. We decided to climb up it.
Here we are at the top of the lighthouse. What a gorgeous view! Sydney on a sunny day cannot be beat.
The jewel in the crown of the Maritime Museum is this replica of Captain Cook’s ship Endeavour. It costs about $15 to get in, but I think it was worth it. The volunteers onboard were all really knowledgeable about life at sea, and at least one of them actually sailed it on its last trip around the world. We clambered up and down and asked lots of questions and tried not to fall over when the waves made it sway side-to-side. I especially liked a nondescript round metal plug in the Captain’s office at the stern of the ship, which had apparently been taken up into space on the shuttle Endeavour. It’s such a neat way to tie this new era of human exploration to its older ancestor. (As you may imagine, Cloud Atlas was on my mind a LOT when we were on the ship.)
This little kid was on the ship with his parents, and he was dressed in a full-on pirate’s costume. I asked him if I could take his picture steering the ship, and he assented. “What’s your pirate name?” I asked. “CAPTAIN BLOOD!” he responded. Good pirate name.
And that’s it! We headed home – well, with a slight detour to Simon Johnson for some delectable cheese – and felt we’d earned the right to laze away the rest of the day…
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La Tartine Fruit Loaf
The Snook and I got up early yesterday to head out to the Good Living Growers’ Market in Pyrmont. It was our first visit and we were not disappointed! When we left an hour later, we were weighed down with asparagus, tomatoes, St. Agur blue cheese (soooo good) from Simon Johnson, some Bircher Muesli from Whisk and Pin, bratwurst and boudin noir (we were feeling very Steingarten) from Eumundi Smokehouse, and last but not least… a genuine La Tartine fruit loaf. (I’d have taken my own picture but this sucker didn’t last long.) For breakfast, we had lattes from Toby’s and wagyu steak sandwiches. YUM. I kept my eyes peeled for an Asian photoblogger, but it looks like we missed AugustusGloop by an hour or two. I think this may become a monthly habit!