Retail Sydney Tuesday 2/26/08

This is a poking-around day. We gobble some cereal, fruit and yogurt for breakfast and decide to spend the day in the CBD (Central Business District). Since we are already there it allows us to get a lazy start and it is 10:30 before we leave the apartment.

Sydney has a New York sort of feel to it. It has "only" four million people in the metro area, which is certainly not huge by world standards, but it feels bigger than that. It does not have the leafy, sculpture-laden classy charm of Melbourne, but it has a different, more metropolitan pulse that we like. It is only about a mile from Darling Harbor on the west to MacQuarie Street and Parliament on the east, and probably a mile and a half from Circular Quay on the north to the train station on the south, which would define the CBD. That makes it easily walkable, and yet each block is packed to the gills with high-rises, restaurants, shops and other businesses, and there are jugglers, magicians and street musicians to provide a constant buzz of activity. That, combined with tens of thousands of folks scurrying here and there, and you have a real sense of excitement.

Our first stop is the Queen Victoria Building (QVB locally) which has been described as the world’s most beautiful shopping mall. It is four levels, give or take, of the classiest retail shops in the world spread over a block, give or take, in the middle of the city in an old gorgeous Victorian building with a central mall and specially designed performing clocks. That part is hard to explain. We spend a couple hours roaming the levels and figuring out the clock performances.
Our exit from the QVB spills us out into Pitt Street Mall, a pedestrian mall that is again all retail storefronts and restaurants and street performers. We are now well into lunch hour for the worker bees at this point, so the streets are swarming. We find a little café on a side street that looks OK and grab a bite of lunch (John the sausage and penne pasta, Mary the chicken foccacia) that is served about 5-minutes after we’re seated. This speed of service is so unlike anything we have seen in Australia that we comment to our server about their efficiency. We peek in the kitchen and see that the cook is Chinese, so that may have something to do with it.

After lunch we go west to MacQuarie Street for a visit to the state Parliament building. It was originally built in the early 1800s as a hospital, and since the contractor hired to build it was paid in rum, the currency of the day, it has always been referred to as the "rum hospital." Around 1900 it was converted to Parliament for New South Wales, the oldest state parliament in Australia. The jokes going from rum to parliament are obviously pretty easy to come by. There is some "member" on closed circuit TV from the main house chamber speaking and we find that he is describing the characteristics of people born in the Chinese year of the rat. As riveting as this is we think we can afford to press on.

We walk through Hyde Park to the south and on to St. Mary’s Cathedral, the oldest Catholic church in Australia and, like every other church we visit, it is being renovated. About half of it is closed off and it all seems pretty dark and threatening. We try to imagine Midnight Mass on Christmas with candles and choirs and halleluiahs, but it is too much of a stretch. We walk back through the park and John decides he has had enough retail, and so deposits Mary at David Jones, the big local department store, and returns to a couch and a book. Mary joins him an hour and a half later.

Mary has spotted a little Italian restaurant down by Circular Quay on one of our previous days and that is our choice for dinner tonight. There is a thunderstorm floating around and it pours for a half hour before we leave, our only rain in many days. We take our brollies and decide that the weather is too threatening to risk the courtyard so eat in the tiny dining room. We have the triple pasta for two which is a linguine, fettucine, gnocchi array with pesto, bolognese and a ham mushroom alfredo sauce with some garlic bread and red wine and we make pigs of ourselves. One more than the other. On the mile walk back, it is drizzling a bit so we stop at a Bavarian pub for a beer where John, in a remarkable display of penny wise and pound foolish, orders the full liter of Paulaner to save a dollar over the price of two pints. It does not come in a carafe or pitcher as planned, but in a liter mug that weighs at least ten pounds and our female server delivers with two hands. As Mary is struggling to take a sip, one of the male bartenders walks past and says, "Impressive. For a Tuesday."

We're back in time to find out who was eliminated from "It Takes Two" before bed.

Today's local headline: Support for Iemma hits ten year low Sydney Morning Herald (NSW Premier is having a rough patch)