Darling Harbour

The remaining four days in Sydney have been fairly quiet. The weather has been hot, humid, rain, thunder, drizzle, mild, sunny, hot…………repeat, repeat. There’s been a lot of soccer played by Granddad and Oisin in the yard, Flynn is just learning to throw a ball so we’ve had games outside with him too. Oisin and I made up Lego farm bricks from the supermarket, just like the ones in NZ, they’ve just been introduced here. I collected them and made a great little farm which I gave away to a friend’s grandson but things are different here: I’d never seen a henhouse, drone or scarecrow in the NZ packages so great excitement to find them. Yes, I know – I haven’t grown up yet!

We’ve visited a few playgrounds including a playland at Rhodes Mall, very impressed with that one and Flynn and Nan had some big races in the ball pit. A new adventure for me, lots of fun. There are three or four playgrounds within walking distance of Jen and Vince’s place, couldn’t resist a slide and swing at this one.

We’ve had a drive around the neighbourhood, streets full of Federation era houses (early 1900’s), different sizes, some with wrap-around verandas, all brick with stucco on some, delicate stained glass in some windows – a contrast to the older Victorian houses we’ve seen, and worker’s cottages like Jen and Vince’s. So different from New Zealand architecture.

Very excited to find an IKEA in Rhodes Mall, no time to get lost in the endless aisles unfortunately but we did buy our favourite ginger snaps which we knew as ‘Anna’s Biscuits’, always a must-buy at IKEA in Singapore when we’d go to buy one thing and go home with bags full of ‘essentials’ (okay, probably not really essential) for our apartment.

Today we had a lovely walk along the Glebe shoreline, which is in a little cove (Blackwattle Bay) part of Sydney Harbour – you can just see the Harbour Bridge in my bigger photo if you look closely. And the close-up, I thought the Tanqueray Gin signage on the building was appropriate when you looked at the line-up of ‘gin palaces’ docked across the bay. Not envious of course. There are lovely new apartment blocks along the shoreline, gardens, parks, and a big playground where we stopped for a while before lunch.

We finished with lunch in The Tramshed – as it sounds, refurbished tramsheds with a token old tram and the rest of the place has several restaurants, all sorts from Italian to Vietnamese. On Sunday there’s a small market in the middle with stalls for lovely candles, fresh bread, olives, handcrafts etc, and there’s also a good supermarket with an emphasis on fresh produce so we came home with focaccia and strawberries for tea.

And that’s our nine days in Sydney, next stop Singapore and then on to Barcelona on Thursday. We’ll be back to Sydney late May. Please join us on our travels over the next few weeks.Read more