Archive for the ‘Sydney city’ Category

All creatures great and small


16 Aug

Posted in Nathan's third year, Sydney city, Toby's first year | 1 Comment »

We seem to have been looking at lots of animals recently. We had a lovely, if cold and windy, day at the zoo several weeks ago. We had cheap tickets because Optus had a family day. The food provided was tolerable, we skipped the entertainment, and enjoyed ourselves wandering around. Every time we go to the zoo we try to catch the bird show that shows off some trained birds from galah to a wedge-tailed eagle. It was the first time that Nathan had seen the show and he really enjoyed it.

Then, a couple of weeks ago I took the kids to the Aquarium. I bought a ticket that gives me (and accompanying children under the age of 4 years old) an unlimited number of entries to four places; the Aquarium, Wildlife World, Sydney Tower and the Manly Aquarium. The beauty of such tickets is that you don’t feel that you HAVE to stay as long as possible so that you get value for your money, you can just drop in for as long or short a time as you might wish.

Nathan was pretty impressed with the dugongs in particular, but also loved the sea dragons (mostly, I suspect, because he knows that Mummy loves sea horses and dragons). We have now been to the aquarium many, many times but Nathan still really enjoys it. Wildlife world is also interesting, though the butterfly enclosure (which is pretty good) is closed at the moment.

Sydney Tower is also an interesting place for Nathan. He stops still and just looks down for ages, before starting to play with binoculars (winding them uo and down) and brings me things from the souvenir shop. The boy can be a menace at times.

Oh, and I can’t forget that we saw whales from Kurnell on my Birthday in early July.

Broccoli


08 Sep

Posted in Andrew, Nathan's first year, Sydney city | 1 Comment »

Yesterday was Andrew’s first official Father’s Day.  He did try to claim one last year, but at that stage Nathan was barely 4 months cooked and I told him he’d have to wait.  We had a lovely day in the city doing a little shopping and then sat in the sun in the botanic gardens for most of the afternoon.

For lunch Andrew and I ate salads and bread rolls that we bought from David Jones (very yummy), and Nathan ate his broccoli, carrots and pears that we brought with us (and had a taste of the salads as well).  Broccoli is a messy vegetable to eat, and because of that I don’t normally let him take a whole floret to eat by himself when we are at home.  In the park it was a different matter…easy to clean up afterwards, so I let him go for it.  The photo above shows the damage.

It was a little chilly when the sun disappeared behind a building in the late afternoon, so we decided it was time to go home.  A chilly end to what had been a beautiful spring day.

New Year’s Eve


04 Jan

Posted in Friends, Sydney city | No Comments »

Our new year celebrations went really well. Gabe and Julie parked at our residential complex, and we all took the train into the city together. There were loads of people already on the Cahill Expressway when we got there, but we squeezed ourselves into a good spot and ate our picnic dinner. The fireworks at 9 pm were pretty good, and then we were kicked off the road. Andrew and I had tickets to the midnight fireworks as well, so we said goodbye to Gabe, Julie and Matthew and lined up to go in again. We got through the bag search area but then had to wait for the gates to open before we could go find ourselves a spot. We found a great spot right at the front of the road and Andrew set up the tripod in preparation (so we didn’t lose our spot!). He took lots of photographs while we waited, and I had a bit of a snooze on the fold up chair that we’d taken.

The midnight fireworks were quite specatcular, with some fireworks being set off from the tops of the buildings surrounding circular quay. However, the bridge didn’t seem to feature in the fireworks until the grand finale. Everyone had set themselves up where we were in order to get a good view of the bridge, and so many were a bit disappointed.

Anyway, for my first lot of fireworks I’ve seen in Sydney for New Year’s Eve, I thought they were pretty good. Andrew didn’t think they were as good as other years. He did get some good photos though!

Then began what felt like a long trek back to the train station, along with hoards of other people. I’ve never seen so many people in the city before! Thankfully we didn’t have to wait long for our train, and it wasn’t too full either.

New Year’s Eve tickets


11 Dec

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Given it’s going to be our last New Year’s Eve on our own, and the last couple haven’t been so good (we didn’t do anything last year, and the year before I had a broken foot and wasn’t very mobile), so we thought it would be nice to spoil ourselves this year and do something really nice. We had wanted to get tickets to the Botanical Gardens where you got a hamper included in the cost of the tickets, but when the tickets came on sale we didn’t have any access to money and when we finally did have access the tickets were sold out. We were both quite disappointed.

About a month ago we both rang and left our name and address to go into the draw for free tickets from the RTA for standing on the Cahill Expressway to see the fireworks. Yesterday, in the mail, I got two letters from the RTA. I thought it must be two speeding fines or something, but when I opened them I found that we had won tickets to both the 9 pm and the midnight fireworks. YAY! So we’re doing something good this year for New Year’s Eve!!

Labour Day long weekend


02 Oct

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Old sink, Cockatoo Island

The plans for our long weekend changed when our car was taken away on the back of a tow truck. It had been serviced and had a clutch replaced, and we only picked it up on Friday evening, so it was very disappointing to see it on the back of a tow truck on Saturday morning.  Luckily it doesn’t appear to have been a difficult thing to fix, something wasn’t put back together correctly, but it did affect our weekend plans.

So, instead of going to Mt. Tomah on Sunday as planned, we had to stay around Sydney. We took the ferry to Cockatoo Island with Aurelie and Nico, and had a picnic lunch before taking a 2 hour tour of the island. It was a fascinating place, with a convict and ship building/repair history. I was rather amused by all the talk of ghosts from our tour guide. She said she was a ghost hunter and that there had been some sightings on the island, but I just can’t believe that sort of thing. Call me an unbeliever if you will. 🙂

After the tour we took the ferry back to Darling Harbour where there was a Brazilian festival over the weekend. I think it was with great delight that the boys watched the dancers with feathers in their hair and very skimpy bikini-like sparkly outfits on! They were good, though, and I love the music. We also watched some dancers from other south American countries and listened to a Columbian group singing and playing their instruments for a while.

We ended up that evening at Aurelie and Nico’s flat for dinner. We’d been invited several times but between us we had just never found a good time. So it was great to have the evening with them. Unfortunately it had been a hot and sunny day, Andrew’s sunglasses were in the car when it was tows, and neither of us remembered a hat for the day. So Andrew wasn’t really feeling so well and we left early.

Monday I spent a lot of the day in my ‘garden’, which consists of some large tubs filled with potting mix on our balcony. I have a worm farm and it was time to clean it out as it was a bit full, so by the time I’d done that and put half the worm castings in each of the tubs, last year’s potting mix looked like a lovely nutritious mix. I planted one tub with only dwarf bean seeds. The other tub got basil, radish and sping onion seeds. I also plan to replenish my dwindling herb supplies from seeds, so we put some seed raising mixture into old egg containers and planted seeds in them. I planted some thyme, oregano and sage seeds, while Andrew planted chilli seeds. Hopefully they will grow and we get around to planting them out this time (last time we grew some of these chilli seeds we never planted them in pots and they died). I just hope that all the new seedlings will survive 3 days without attention in a couple of weeks when we are down in Melbourne.

Tricia and Aaron


28 Sep

Posted in Family, Friends, Sydney city | No Comments »

Tricia is a friend I have known my entire life. Literally! She is one year older than me, and when we were growing we lived across the road from each other. Our parents are good friends and for many years they have played cards together most Sunday nights that they were all free, and we used to laugh about their post mortems in the days following their matches. Trish would even come on our family holidays when we were kids. I moved to Melbourne to go to uni, Trish went there to live a few years afterwards and once again we could regularly see each other. She worked in the city and I travelled through each day, so we’d meet up on Friday nights for dinner and eat out somewhere. Then I moved to the other side of Melbourne, and by this stage Trish was married and soon had a son, and so we’d catch up about one Saturday a month for lunch. Then I moved to Sydney, and it again became hard to keep in touch. But it doesn’t matter, for no matter what happens in our lives we will always be friends.

Anyway, Tricia came to visit for a few days with her son Aaron, who is now 10 years old. They arrived on Saturday evening, and so yesterday we spent most of the day wandering around the city and Manly. We drove to Darling Harbour and then walked to the city and Circular Quay, stopping at the Lindt shop for some refreshments on the way. Then we caught a ferry to Manly where we had a late lunch of fish and chips. Aaron wanted to play footy on the beach and harassed Tricia to buy him a football, so we found a cheap, small squashy ball that would do, but by this time we were heading back to the ferry. So we decided to walk to the Opera House when we got back to Circular Quay, and then go to the Botanical gardens where there are lots of large grassy spaces that we thought he’d be able to play with his ball in. Unfortunately, when we got there we saw a sign saying no balls, so poor Aaron couldn’t play even there.

We went to the BBQ King for a chinese dinner which was really tasty and both Andrew and I enjoyed a lot. Unfortunately I don’t think it went down too well with 10 year old Aaron. From there it was back to the car, and a short drive home. I think everyone was exhausted after walking so far!

Tricia and Aaron were staying until Tuesday morning, so Monday night after work we all went to Gabe and Julie’s house for dinner (we took lasagne and a salad, Julie organised garlic bread and dessert) and had a great night there.

It was really wonderful to have Tricia and Aaron visit. 🙂

Sydney boat show


07 Aug

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On Saturday we went to the Pyrmont Farmers Market and afterwards had a walk around Cockle Bay to have a look at the boat show.  There were some magnificent boats on display!  We also came across a boat building competition where the competitors had to build a boat from the supplied materials (wood and glue) within 2 hours.  We arrived about 1 hour into the competition and we watched until they were finished.  I was absolutely amazed at the different designs that were being built, and I watched with interest one boat that seemed to be better built than the rest.  Most of the competitors were ship building apprentices, but the very well built one was a bit of a show off (to show what they could do) as they took their time and finished just outside the 2 hour time limit, and they had brought along a fibreglass top.  When it was built it looked like a little speed boat!   They all went for lunch and came back to have a race around Cockle Bay!

Andrew and I decided to do the same.  We had some lunch at Dixons and then went back to watch the race.  It was pretty funny!  Some had much better paddles than others (they also had to build their own paddles) and one looked more like a barge and had two inflated sheep on the deck.  Obviously they did very poorly on the race and didn’t really get very far.   A boat that was there for support threw them a rope to help them back to dry land, but the entire thing tipped over when it was pulled by the boat.  🙂

It was a fun Saturday.

Birthday yum cha


10 Jul

Posted in Food, Friends, Sydney city | No Comments »

Yum cha

Andrew and I spent Saturday in the city. It was Andrew’s birthday on Friday and mine on Sunday, so we sort of split the difference and decided to celebrate by having yum cha on Saturday with Gabe, Julie, the kids and Iris.

We picked Iris up from Redfern station around 9 am and then drove to a car park in the city. We walked down to the Pyrmont Growers Market and spent an hour or so wandering around. Andrew and Iris both had Wagyu beef steak sandwiches for breakfast while I had a Thai chicken curry pie. I bought some goats cheese that I simply love, tasted some blood oranges that were delicious so I bought some of those too, then Andrew went off for a coffee and Iris and I both bought some orange juice. We went past a stall that sold ‘icecream sandwiches’ and was told that if I chose a flavour and came back in about 10 minutes I could taste it (it had to warm up a bit to make it easy to cut). I chose caramel pecan, which was caramel icecream between two pecan biscuits. Very delicious, I must say! We bought a loaf of bread and the newspaper, and took everything back to the car.

We planned to have yum cha for lunch, but we were waiting for Gabe and Julie to meet us with the kids. Julie rang to say that Angela was still sleeping and they’d be later than planned. Iris said it would be nice to just sit in the sun for an hour with a Starbucks coffee, so we arranged a place to meet and said we’d call her in about an hour to let her know what was happening. Then Andrew and I headed to the city to wander around and do a little window shopping.

Just over an hour later Julie rang to say they were on their way, so we called Iris and organised to meet her near the Chinese restaurant. The timing was pretty good, by the time we got a table Gabe and Julie were only about 5 minutes or so from the restaurant. It ended up being a pretty late lunch, so there wasn’t as much choice of food as normal, but we also were able to sit around the table for ages after we finished eating because lunch was over and they weren’t seating people for dinner yet.

When we finally left the restaurant, Andrew and I walked to Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair to see the USS Kittyhawk that was in Sydney for 5 days. From there we walked through the botanical gardens and back to the carpark.

It was a lovely day.

White rabbits and other things


21 May

Posted in Sydney city | No Comments »

Yesterday Andrew and I went to the city for the afternoon. We had both been craving yum cha again after we’d enjoyed it so much a couple of weeks ago, so we went back to the same place. This time one of our dishes was Shanghai dumplings, and they were very tasty! Just like the ones we had in Shanghai! Yummmm!!!!!

After that we headed to the State Library to go and see the World Press Photo Exhibition, but we took our time getting there. First we browsed the shops at Queen Victoria Building, and one shop had some great pop-up books. I’ve never seen pop-up books so intricate, but then again I’m not that up to date on children’s books. The story was told in little booklets that were stuck to the main pop-up pages, and even those booklets had small pop-ups. Yes, I’m such a big kid, so I bought Alice in Wonderland (though I think Alice looks pretty grumpy in many of the pictures). Anyway, it’s a great addition to our collection of kids books which are always ready (along with toys) for the kids of any friends who might come to visit.

Next stop was at the Lindt chocolate place where Andrew bought a coffee and we got 4 filled chocolates (for about $7), but they were delicious. It wasn’t far to the library from there, and we spent some time wandering around the photos. Neither Andrew nor I think that the best photo was the one that won the competition, but all the photos were great. I just thought it was a pity that the information about each photo/set of photos was in a small font, which meant we had to get really close to the photo to read it all, and with all the people in the gallery it was hard to not get in the way of those trying to view the photo.

When we left the State Library we walked back to Circular Quay train station through the Botanical gardens. It is such a beautiful place and so relaxing. We really must spend a day in the gardens sometime.
We had a lovely and relaxing afternoon.

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