While Oxford Street is a busy, fairly ugly thoroughfare, the surrounding Paddington and Darlinghurst neighborhoods are cute and pretty to walk around. The area was built up in the late 1800's to house Sydney's growing working class, in row after row of Sydney's now quintessential terrace houses. These Victorian gems remind many people of New Orleans because of the ornate grills on the balconies. A couple decades ago, the area became the center of the gay community, which bought these largely dilapidated homes and restored them to their original beauty.

We spent Sunday shopping, which frankly isn't a big Sydney strength. Sydney has the usual international luxury labels, but the shops are smallish and not that interesting. It's only got one high end department store, David Jones, and a decent selection of homegrown boutiques, but nothing compared to New York, Europe or even Melbourne. The main shopping district is in the CBD, but we're going to explore the CBD in a subsequent trip for blog purposes. Each of the small neighborhoods all over Sydney also has its local shopping area, which are usually cute but small and hard to get to, so not worth the effort for tourists. So that leaves Oxford Street, a big, generally ugly street that carves through Sydney, connecting the CBD to Bondi Beach. The two neighborhoods it cuts through, Paddington and Darlinghurst, are the main gay neighborhoods, so Sydney's famous Mardi Gras parade sashays down Oxford Street every March. Starting from the CBD, Oxford Street is a pretty motley collection of cheap Thai restaurants, gay bars and some very basic shops. After it passes through Taylor Square, ground zero of gay Sydney, the street smartens up, with some nice cafes and restaurants and trendy boutiques.

After lunch we walked around Watson's Bay for a bit. It's a five minute walk to the Pacific Ocean side, from where you can get good views of the North Head, the other part of the entrance to the Harbor, where Manly is. There's a big navy base on Watson's Bay which puts alot of Watson's Bay off limits, but there's a nude gay beach on the harbour side on the way back to the ferry if that's your cup of tea.

Watson's Bay sits on the narrow strip of land separating the Harbour from the Pacific Ocean. Doyle's is a very famous tourist trap sitting at the beach, waiting to catch tourists as they get off the ferry. It's been around for about eighty years, and has now spread to four or five different buildings, all serving the same very average seafood. But the views are great, looking all the way back to the Sydney skyline, and it's a great place to linger outdoors over some wine and oysters. But the cooked food tends to get rubbery and tasteless, so remember fresher is better. And don't be in a hurry, as service is really slow. (Food-9, Decor-12, Service-8).

Woke up late on Saturday and met our friends Murray and Jenny. We checked out the weekend market in the Rocks for a bit, which consists of people selling trinkets in an outdoor market set up to upstage the usual shops in the Rocks selling trinkets. Then we headed out on the harbour, taking a ferry to Watson's Bay for a lunch at Doyle's. There are two main tourist ferry lines, one to Manly, which is popular because it's the longest one, dropping you off on the far north shore, and the other to Watson's Bay, which also goes to the end of the harbour but stays on the south shore. I like this one better because a)it's the one I now take to and from work every day and b) it goes in and out all the bays along the way so there's lots more to see, while the Manly ferry goes straight across the harbour so you're mostly looking at water.

Had a great dinner at Rockpool, one of Sydney's two uber-famous restaurants ( the other is Tetsuya's). Neil Perry, the chef, is Sydney's first celebrity chef, but it appears he's gotten too big for his britches. Last year ('06) he was downgraded to a mere two hats, and in the just published '07 rankings he failed to regain his third hat. So Neil closed the restaurant down in retaliation, and this review is therefore pointless. Actually it sounds like he's going to open another restaurant in this space, but it will be pretty different conceptually.





If you want to know how our meal was even though you'll never have it, it was fantastic. He's known for combining heavy Asian influences with Mod Oz cuisine. We went with a tasting menu of about twelve courses, which was really interesting. Highlights included a modern take on sushi and a fantastic tea smoked duck. Unfortunately, we made the usual mistake of ordering matching wine with our courses. They always say the wine servings will be scaled down in size, but it's a lie, and you end up with a dozen glasses of wine. Anyway, it was a great meal, served very professionally, although staff seemed a bit harried and robotic. The room isn't my favorite, as its windowless and decorated a bit faux futuristically. (Food-20, Decor-13, Service-17).





Notwithstanding our massive wine intake, we then went round the Quay to the Opera Bar, underneath the Sydney Opera House. We met our friend Anita there and enjoyed a couple more hours of winedrinking outdoors along the harbour, then called it a night.

You see the photo with the office buildings? That's the CBD, the central business district. In front of the buildings is Circular Quay, the ferry terminal, which you can see up close in the photo with the ferries and the Harbour Bridge as a backdrop. The left side of Circular Quay has a few apartment buildings, ending in the Sydney Opera House, and behind that is the Domain and Royal Botanical Gardens, which you saw in the previous post. And the right side of Circular Quay is the Rocks, which we just left. Circular Quay is, as you can see, not circular, and pronounced funnily (like Key). It's also ground zero of tourist Sydney, with the bridge, opera house and a ferry ride being the only must do things in Sydney. But it's also the main commuter center for the city, since all the ferries and the train terminate here.



Just between us, I think the Opera House is very overrated. From a distance, such as in Somchai's beautiful photo, it looks very avant-garde and striking, but up close it's very clearly a product of its decade, the seventies. I really like the design, but the materials, concrete and brown tinted glass, and the horrible tiles covering the place which look like kitchen linoleum, really need a makeover.

We spent the rest of the day walking around the area near the hotel, the Rocks and Circular Quay. The Rocks is the oldest part of Sydney, and is where the first prisoners who were dumped in Australia in 1788 eked out an existence. As Sydney slowly morphed from a jail to a proper city, the Rocks became the city's port. Like port cities all over the world, the Rocks was notorious for crime and vice, even more so given Sydney's prisoner heritage. As Sydney continued to prosper and distanced itself from its criminal past, the Rocks was further isolated and became the city's slum. In 1900 the plague broke out in the Rocks, and the city ended up buying almost the whole area and embarking on a demolition program to clean it up once and for all.



Redevelopment stopped in the 1970's, and what was left of the area was preserved as a heritage attraction. George Street, its main street, is now thronged with tourists shopping its quaint tourist shops, and locals getting very drunk in the many pubs, relics from its lively port days.

On Friday I worked in the morning and had lunch at Machiavelli's, the preferred restaurant of Sydney's powerlunching crowd. It's certainly the worst restaurant I've been to in Sydney, and one of the worst anywhere. It's housed in a couple of dark, windowless rooms, decorated with black and white photos of Australian politicians. Apparently it's a big deal to have your photo on the wall, and the restaurant moves them around depending on who's in and who's out. None of this is interesting to me, and as decor, it's pretty lame. Food is very basic Italian, like spaghetti and meatballs or veal parmigiano, stuff nobody's ordered in a couple decades. In keeping with the menu, the waiters are well past retirement age, and the only time you'll see them smile is in this photo. One very discordant note, the waiters are wired with a headphone and a handheld computer for taking orders, which looks really funny when wielded by an eighty year old. (Food-5, Decor-4, Service-4).

After drinks we went upstairs to est., the hotel's flagship restaurant. Sydney uses chef's hats rather than stars in its restaurant ratings, and est. is one of the half dozen Sydney restaurants awarded three hats. It's got the same Soho tin ceiling and pillared loft decor as the bar downstairs, but it's a much more rarefied environment. This happens to be one of our favorite restaurants, and we invariably bring our friends here who are visiting from out of town, but I guess I wasn't overwhelmed on this initial visit. Quoting from the journal, food was good but not very inventive or flavorful, and service was patchy and slow. I started with a very nice foie gras dish, but followed with a disappointingly bland barramundi. Somchai had a boring piece of swordfish for his main. (Food-13, Decor-18, Service-13). We did enjoy the wine though, a '92 Yalumba shiraz. Thailand has plenty of Australian wines, but usually dirt cheap, with French wines occupying the mid and upper ranges. I'm still a French wine fan, but it's fun to be introduced to a new world of high quality Australian wines here. And remember, the restaurant is much better than what I wrote here, I was probably just cranky from lack of sleep.

After work I met Somchai at the Establishment Bar in the lobby of the Establishment Hotel. The hotel is actually a rare contradiction to my opening Sydney post bemoaning the lack of unique hotels. The Establishment is a small boutique hotel with about twenty loftlike rooms in the CBD. But the lodging is something of an afterthought, as the hotel has bunch of very popular bars and restaurants which are the real moneymakers. The lobby bar is constantly packed and very rowdy, a popular meeting place for Sydney yuppies after work, which means about 3 pm here.

The park occupies two points with a broad bay in between. The famous Opera House occupies the western point, with the much less famous Government House nearby. Pictured above, it was the home of the governors of New South Wales (of which Sydney is the capital). It's now open to the public for tours, which are a great idea because there's not much that's tour-worthy in Sydney. The other point is called Mrs. Macquarie's Point. Mrs. Macquarie was the wife of Sydney's most famous governor, who bequeathed his name to about sixty percent of all things nameable in Sydney. The governor's wife had a chair carved into the rock on this point, where she used to watch the boats from England sailing into the harbor. The chair is still a tourist attraction, although most people come for the quintessential Sydney photo of the Opera House and Harbour Bridge.

By the way, these photos come from later trips, when we finally have a digital camera (except for the schoolkids one, which is an internet ripoff). As you can see, the photos are a million times better quality, and they obviously are much easier blogwise, since I'm still taking old photos out of photo albums and scanning them, which is really slow. It also ruins the pics. Anyway, I think we have one more trip after Sydney before we make the digital switch, and I'm so excited! (Really, not sarcastically)

Somchai, possibly the world's most sociable person, made friends with a Turkish family in the park. They live in Sydney but were picnicking in the park, and Somchai became an honorary Turk for a day. Anyway, the park is a beautiful place with great views, and most of Sydney uses it as their back yard. When we moved here, our first apartment was in Potts Point, on the other side of the park, so I used to walk through the park every day on my way to and from work. It's a great way to commute, although I have to say I was always a bit freaked out walking under the trees laden with bats. There are thousands of them, and a big hit with tourists, but I was always worried they'd crap on me.

Like Bangkok and New York, Sydney presents a blogging problem. We visit all these cities frequently, and of course lived in Bangkok and now live in Sydney. So we've got lots of trips, photos, journal entries for these cities and I can't figure out how to blog these. I've been keeping with a chronological approach, which ends up being disjointed and a bit repetitive. (Actually for Bangkok I've just ignored it for now since we never really visited it, just lived there. I'll eventually do a Bangkok entry of course.) So I guess I'll just stick with the chronology, and try to cover different parts of Sydney on each trip.

I worked all day, which was pretty exhausting since I had just arrived that morning. Somchai hung out in the Domain, the huge park that also houses the Botanical Gardens. The business district (CBD) lines one side of the park, and the harbor another, so it's very central and popular with locals and tourists alike. For those of you interested in the mundane details of my life, my office is in the brown square building on the far right of the photo.

102. Sydney, Australia Nov '03

Took a business trip to Sydney for a few days. Both Somchai and I had been to Sydney several times so weren't particularly excited about this trip, but it was the first time we had come together. Actually, Somchai was in Melbourne and met me in Sydney on Thursday morning.

We stayed at the Park Hyatt, probably the best hotel in Sydney, but that isn't saying much. For such a fun city that tries hard to be individual and sophisticated, it fails miserably in the hotel department. The usual suspects are all here, but there are very few options outside the big chain hotels. The Park Hyatt wins over the others partly because it's smaller so feels a bit less institutional, and also its great location along Circular Quay, across from the Opera House. It's in the area of Sydney called the Rocks, which is fun and atmospheric, and just a few minutes from the business district. Service is very good, which I have to admit is a surprising strong suit among the otherwise undistinguished Sydney hotel circuit. On the down side, the rooms are a decent size, but really boringly decorated with furniture best described as functional. Actually the furniture was terrible when we were there, but has since been renovated (as per the above picture). So it's upgraded from terrible to boring, not sure why they couldn't have actually hired the Park Hyatt Tokyo decorating team instead. Room: 5, Facilities: 7, Service: 7, overall: 6.

We stayed mostly downtown in our week in New York, but I did want to show Somchai all the different neighborhoods that make up Manhattan. A lot of cities like to stress they are made up of distinct neighborhoods, and guidebooks are always organized around that theme, but honestly very few really are. They all have neighborhoods of course, but they're usually historical place names and have little distinctiveness. As I type this I'm sitting on my deck in Darling Point, looking at three other "neighborhoods", Bellevue, Double Bay and Point Piper, but they are almost completely interchangeable. Beautiful views, some great houses, but there's no way you could tell one from the other. NY is different,and each neighborhood is precisely drawn, and differs wildly by ethnicity, architecture, culture etc. Just to the east of SoHo are the very sharply defined Little Italy and Chinatown, with the gay center of Greenwich Village just to the north. Somchai trodded around all the 'hoods, and I'm not sure he saw the differences as clearly as I did, so I think you need to spend some time to really get to know the place. So maybe all the tourists that pound the pavement looking for the Hollywood New York aren't disappointed since they're just looking for a live version of their TV shows, but spending some time wandering the streets is really the best way to appreciate it. Oh, and as you can see, Central Park is perfectly safe and lovely. Before we visited, Somchai was sure only muggers were in Central Park, so I dragged him in there on the last day to show him that it's a lively, beautiful place that NY couldn't live without.

That was too happy an ending, so I'd like to amend the Central Park comments. It is beautiful, and safe, but also very, very unpredictable. When we first entered, I remember we saw this guy in tight white shorts with an enormous fake penis shoved down them. He was walking around the park and everyone was laughing. Somchai gave me such an "I told you so" look and I thought he was going to flee the park after that, but he persevered, and something like that happens to you, you should too, and just stash the memory for future use in your own blog.