Sunday, June 15, 2003

 
Saturday a bit more in detail:

First of all, we both slept very very well. Noise does not really seem to be a problem, but then again, it is weekend. Wait for monday. But at least no rooster. The calm humming of the AC-turned-heater also covers lots of the traffic noise.

For breakfast I made tea, Yoghurt with strawberries and banana and then english muffins.

I quickly went to the closest Internet Cafe to do the first update, but their machines were so crappy that it took me a while to get anything done .. downloading email was out of the question. Really need to find a way to use my own computer.

Back to the hotel and off we went to Paddy's market, which is basically in the basement of the Market City Mall. It is a like a street market with a section for veggies and seafood and such, but the bigger part has stalls selling 10$-sunglasses, hats, cheap clothing (but most with brand names :), some electronics, wigs, lingerie (!), souvenirs, mainly a lot of crap but also some good finds.

Above at market city we discovered that the big chinese supermarket Thai Kee has a fantastic selection of japanese food as well, so we shopped until we dropped, some things were just too good to be true to find them, and many items were temptingly cheap ... e.g. rolls of papertowels (for some reason quite expensive in Fiji) ... but we realized that this may become a volume problem. I was very happy to have found my favorite japanese Pizza chips, but now they also had okonomiyaki flavor, have not tried that one though. With 120AU$ less in our pockets (well, off my credit card) and 5 full bags we made our way back. Realizing that our tummies were growling AND that we cannot get thai food in Fiji, we had lunch at a thai place and it was very nice.

Once we returned to the hotel we rested only for a short time. More to explore. We walked north through Hyde Park, Ritsu loved those birds with the superlong beaks, and after a 30 minute march we arrived at the opera house. Always a stunning sight, especially on a sunny day when the sun reflects in the 'sails' and of course also the combined vista of the opera house and the harbor bridge ... after walking around there we walked to Circular Kay, the main hub for all ferries, and we continued to "The Rocks" ... the older part of Sydney where the first settlers lived. They had a nice, fancy crafts market, with lots of sophisticated and expensive dust-collectors to buy. I was very fond of 2 food stalls, one making their own hot sauces in all kinds of different flavors and degrees of hotness and the other had self made jams, one being "Lemon, Passion-fruit and Butter" ... I was able to taste that and it was pure evil ... so good.

We then started walking south again, loosely the direction of the hotel, since our feet started hurting, thus on the way I stopped to buy a pair of sneakers (was on the shoppinglist for AU anyway) and from then on walking was a bit better. We found the huge Kinokuniya bookstore, but unlike the one in New York, this one had a bigger selection of chinese and english books than japanese books it seems. It was still very impressive.

We came by lots more stores on the way back, but behaved very well and finally reached the hotel where we chilled out for a while.

For dinner we went to a close by kaiten sushi place called "Makoto", where we actually had to wait outside for about 20 minutes before we got seated. (nice touch was that the manager brought all the waiting people hot tea, since it was quite chilly out there). The place seems to be quite popular and it turned out to be very yummy. Bummer was that they did not serve beer, as we keep learning now, most places are BYO = bring your own, funny thing. The sushi was great, we had Uni (seaurchin), Unagi (eel), Ikura, Maguro, some kind of snapper, makarel ... i like that about kaiten sushi places, that you can so easily just pick what you want.

Full and happy we returned to the hotel and after some TV we fell asleep.
posted by Peter 9:16 PM