Saturday, October 18, 2003

 
Day #7, Saturday

Finally we could sleep in and I made pancakes for Ritsu for breakfast. Then we took the train to get to South Bank where we picked up some handcrafted earrings which I had ordered earlier in the week and to enjoy the arts and crafts market, which was very nice. We then slowly walked back to the city and did some final shopping ... for the first time in months I got to buy a CD. Michael Bublé, a canadian guy who tries to be, just like Harry Connick Jr. and Robbie Williams, to be the next Frank Sinatra reincarnation, and he is pretty good at that. I heard some of the songs in various record stores over the speakers and every time I found my self either singing or swinging along.

For lunch we treated us to our long time favorite Subway Roast Beef sandwich, seems the australians have a slightly different idea about roast beef, but it was still very nice. Here a nice view of the Queen Street Mall, up and down:




Some more shopping (another batch of marked down cook books for me) and then we returned to the hotel to start packing and just relaxing a bit and the getting ready to go out for dinner for which I had made reservations (or as they call it here "booking") at Restaurant Two (they really do not have it with names here). This was the closest we got on this trip to a New York fine dining experience. The place is great, but don't count on a great view, even though it is close to the river and the botanic garden. What you see is mainly parked cars. But the food was all around delicious. Appetizers were a half dozen of Coffin Bay Oysters and 6 seared scallops around a bundle of angel hair pasta tinted with squid ink (which tastes salty and fishy ... and leaves your lips from time to time quite black, so, don't order this one when you are working on impressing a date). And then Ritsu had fresh baramundi (a white fish) and I had the asian duck. Both impeccable and extremely yummy. There were some nice items on the desert menu (the cheese selection alone was great), but there was simply no space left.




2 things we would have loved to have known before and I want to ad about this restaurant: They have a special 38$ three course lunch menu which looked very nice, and they have a Digestive tasting thingie on monday-thursday evenings which has 8 courses for 95$, and if you feel like you can have a different wine with each (only a small tasting glass) for 40$ extra. If we had been to that place earlier, we would have come back a second time in that week.

We took a nice digestive stroll along the waterfront back to the hotel and happy and full we went to bed.
posted by Peter 11:40 PM