Summer 2018 big trip - day 16

Sunday 12th August

I'm actually writing this, or the part about this evening anyway, on the day for a change, although it won't be published until I've caught up and written and published the rest of the days until now. It's because I've had the evening to myself in this wonderful little house we're staying in, and I want to write about it before I forget about it.

It's a quirky place, in a lovely residential suburb. The house is old and cold, and the lounge is dark. But I'm sitting here in one of the armchairs (which don't match each other or the sofa), with the tall standing lamp next to it spreading its warm light into the room, a blanket over my knees and the little gas heater on (it heats the room very well, but probably is far from energy efficient). It's perfectly cosy. The floor is dark wood, with a red rug over it. There are pictures (as in artwork, not photographs) on the walls and vases dotted around. There are DVDs of the Italian crime drama series Inspector Montalbano. The kitchen has a stovetop whistling kettle, a wooden board for bread and a bowl of lemons on the counter. There are eco-friendly chemical-free cleaning products and books on homemade things like that. Upstairs is a large lounge area which is light and open and airy, but warmer than downstairs, and there's a dining table covered in sewing materials. And, best of all, there are books in every room. Hundreds of books. Books on subjects I wish I knew more about. Travel and foreign countries and languages, cooking, history, literature/ fiction, plants, gardening, sewing and needlework and embroidery, art and crafts and more. I could spend a week here just in the house, devouring a treasure trove of books. Alas, I cannot, so I've just noted down a few that I'd like to find and read when I'm home.

My sister, mum and stepdad went to see Pink this evening. I didn't fancy going, and had a couple of options for what I could do for the evening, but after a day walking around Sydney Harbour, I felt like staying in, out of the chilly wind, and watching a bit of Netflix. I watched the last episode of Spanish drama Cable Girls, an episode of Queer Eye, and then a quirky French rom-com called Blind Date, which I loved. Such a lovely, relaxing evening :)

So, rewind... In the morning we walked from Waverton into the city centre. The route took us through the lovely suburb, which again reminded me of Vancouver, and brought us to the waterfront at Lavender Bay, where we were greeted with a view of the Harbour Bridge directly opposite. We walked along from there, eventually reaching Milsons Point and Luna Park, a fairground built in the 1930s at the foot of the bridge. The entrance gateway is the kind of thing that would be very creepy if the place was closed. I wonder why fairgrounds are like that, creepy when closed.

The suburb at the northern end of the bridge is called Kirribilli. I've since read that it's one of the city's most affluent, and it was very nice, though we only saw a very small part of it. There were trendy, quirky cafés and eateries and a wonderful market in the large underpass under the bridge road. My sister and I spent a long time wandering around the market before we went back to where our mum and stepdad were sat people-watching (they immediately told me they'd seen a woman who was me in 30 years), and we all started across the bridge.

I can't remember how long it took to walk across. The thing is enormous. It's over a kilometre long, and nearly fifty metres wide with eight lanes for cars, two for trains, one for cyclists and one for pedestrians. It's quite impressive that the designers in the 1920s thought ahead and decided that cars and other road vehicles would become commonplace enough that the bridge would need six lanes just for those (the two tramway lanes originally constructed were later converted to roadway as well). The bridge was nicknamed "the Iron Lung", as its construction brought vital jobs to the city during the Depression. In the shadow of the other end of the bridge is The Rocks, a pretty area of cobbled lanes originally established in the early days of the colony in the 1790s, when it was more of a slum. We wandered through but not really around it.

We stopped for lunch at one of the numerous waterfront restaurants on Circular Quay. Despite its name the quay is in a rather square U-shape, with The Rocks and the Harbour Bridge at one end and the Opera House on Bennelong Point at the other, with an art gallery and boats (from harbour tour boats to cruise ships) and shops and restaurants and more all along in between, and the skyscrapers of the CBD rising behind. Such a cool place! We sat outside, with a great view of the bridge, where they had notices everywhere warning customers about the seagulls, and spray bottles on some of the outer tables. One thieving bird swooped down and snatched a small fillet of battered fish from one woman's plate as she was still eating. Thankfully we were seated under a parasol, which provided a deterrent for the gulls as well as shade from the sun. I had barramundi with salsa verde and a lovely fresh salad - so simple, but so good. Fresh fish! *Grins* Yum. Also had a mocktail, a strawberry and lychee virgin mojito, which was nice.

After lunch we continued along Circular Quay to see Sydney Opera House up close. I had looked at going there while my family were at the Pink concert - there was a performance by the Australian Symphony Orchestra - but it turned out it was at 2pm rather than in the evening, and I'd rather see the city during the day. A bit of a shame, though, I would have enjoyed that. The wind was chilly but we didn't go inside, we stayed outside looking at the architecture and the plaza and the other tourists and the views and it all... then went and got a coffee to warm up before we started heading back to the house. I don't like tea or coffee or hot chocolate, which sometimes, on cold days, is something I wish was different. (Back in January I had a white hot chocolate for the first time, which I loved, but it's too sugary and sweet to have often, and not many places do them anyway.) If I had known that a babychino was just warm milk with no coffee, I would have gotten one long before now. Why don't they just call it warm milk, and have a 'small' cup option as well as an espresso-sized one? Babies aren't the only ones who like warm milk.

Earlier, outside an Italian restaurant opposite the jetties, I'd noticed a sign saying "Come and try our homemade cannoli!" or something like that. I looooove cannoli, so as we passed it again on the way to the train station I went in and asked if they did takeaway cannoli. They did, so I ordered one, and after a few minutes they brought it out in one of those plastic takeaway containers - a crisp, golden cannolo (-o is singular, -i is plural) filled half with a thick chocolate-ricotta mixture and half with a glossy, sweet, vanilla ricotta, and fixed to the bottom of the container with a dollop of the vanilla mixture to keep it from moving around. They put the container in a paper bag and I held it close and horizontal on the way back to Waverton, looking forward to enjoying it after dinner while watching some Netflix :)