Australia Trip - Day 1 and 2!
We made it!
I’m writing from here in Australia! Darren, David and Jeremy have traveled here from far away San Francisco. Here’s the play by play on the trip so far…
Qantas Flight 74
We began our trip on a Qantas flight, direct from San Francisco to Sydney. The flight departed at 10:30pm PST (on-time) without incident. The plane was absolutely huge - a double-decker with 75 rows total and 11 seats across in economy. Passing through the cabin, we got a peak at the Business Class section - boy did it look nice. When we arrived at the Economy section we discovered lots of goodies on our seat including a travel pack, blanket, pillows, etc. There was also a TV in every seat with on-demand Qantas movies. Unfortunately the seats were typical, cramped economy seats. I got the middle seat and discovered there was also a video box at my feet, killing another half a foot of legroom. And then I discovered that the in-flight entertainment system in my seat was broken. Being that I hate flying, I was really counting on this system to help provide a distraction during the 15-hour flight! Such is my luck. Good thing I brought a laptop to entertain me, and there were also some spare seats in other aisles that I utilized while bored so that I could still watch TV.
The flight was uneventful, which was great! We arrived in Sydney at 6:30am though, and boy was I tired! I had no idea how much the time change was going to impact me! Upon arriving in Sydney we discovered it was absolutely pouring rain. This was quite disappointing to us. We later found out that the day we arrived was a day of record rainfall (over 100cm!).
The Pensione Hotel
We took our time in traveling to our hotel, where check-in was not until 2:00pm local time. We locked up our gear at some lockers in the hotel and took to touring the city for several hours before trying to check-in at the hotel. The hotel was relatively nice but very basic - it seemed to be a cross between a backpackers hostel and a hotel. All the rooms were private rooms, relatively small with simple decorations. There was a downstairs guest lounge which featured a kitchen for public use, some internet kiosks, some lockers and of course a coffee machine. We knew we picked the right place when we discovered how many other backpackers there were at the hotel as well. Most of them, surprisingly, seemed to be from Australia or the UK (based on their accents). I don’t think we noticed anyone with an American accent.
Touring Sydney
Darling Harbour
We spent the morning walking about in the torrential rains, trying to stay awake so we could reset our internal clocks to the new time zone. We found ourselves exploring the Circular Quay (which we learned was pronounced Circular Key) and Darling Harbour. To avoid some of the rain we decided to explore the Australian National Maritime Museum. It was a cool place with lots of history and information about the harbour as well as Sydney’s relationship to America and other places. The museum was fun. Ironically I think my favorite part was the boat made out of beer cans (I mean really, that’s just too funny).
The Rocks
Next we wandered up to the area known as The Rocks. Clearly a tourist trap, we hoped to find an inexpensive place to grab a beer. That was an unsuccessful mission, as we found most drinks started at $7 AUD and most snacks started at $10 AUD. So off to Kings Cross we went, on a search for food and entertainment.
Kings Cross
We had heard Kings Cross was the redlight district but was also filled with restaurants, pubs and other establishments which sounded like they balanced out the place. Well, that was an overstatement. There were a tremendous number of adult entertainment shops all lined next to each other, and only when you got off the main drag did you find a collection of hidden (and nice looking) restaurants. Despite being the redlight district, there were plenty of police patrolling the area and the area was quite clean - definitely cleaner the San Francisco’s sketchy neighborhoods. We eventually found a thai restaurant to grab a bite at and found the food to be quite excellent. We then took the Sydney CityRail back to our hotel and checked out the pub underneath named Charlie Chan’s.
Charlie Chan’s
Little did we realize that Charlie Chan’s was actually a mini-casino, and Sydney seems to have a lot of these mini-casinos! At first, while sitting in the pub, we did not notice any casino-related activity, but people kept walking out of random doors through the pub without stopping for a drink or a look. Curious where these people were coming from, we explored a hallway to find a bustling room of slot machines and casino games, filled with people. Uninterested, we decided to save our money for the big casino - Star City - which we’d planned to visit a bit later.
Off to bed we finally went at around 9:00pm, as it felt like we’d been up for days. Oh yes, we had been! 
Sydney - Day 2
Intent on saving some money, we awoke the next morning and decided to go shopping across the street in the World Square building - a huge office building with a big mall in the downstairs portion. It was complete with strange, cheap cell phone and trinket stores plus a full grocery store named Cole’s. We bought some items at the grocery to share for breakfast and returned to our hotel.
Talk about the wrong place at the wrong time. When we returned to the hotel we began making breakfast and were approached by three NSW Police officers who questioned us in regards to a robbery that had occurred in the hotel. Apparently a patron had left his window open overnight and someone had stolen his valuables, and I guess they had used his credit card at a nearby Woolworth store. Luckily we’d saved the receipt showing we were actually at a different store at around the same time, and the police seemed happy with our info and left us alone. Still a bit creepy though, if you ask me.
Newtown and Glebe
Anyway, after this point we discovered it was still raining outside but much less then the previous day. We decided to explore the areas of Newtown and Glebe. We took the CityRail to these areas and discovered that Newtown resembled something like the Mission District in San Francisco, full of funky clothing shops, stores and cheap cafes. There were a lot of Thai cafes, too! Much better signage and a much longer strip of stores then anything in the states, though. All the stores were very cleverly named and we found some of the stores to be quite humorous (”Bite Me” burger comes to mind, among others). The area was quite active despite it being a working Monday - lots of people on the streets.
We followed King Street until we hit the Sydney Univerisity, which we explored as well. It had beautiful buildings and a bustling student campus. It was also very big!
At the other side of the University we found a really nice lawn area and a street named Glebe Point Road. We decided to walk up Glebe Point Road where we found even more cafes and restaurants - a bit more upscale then Newtown - and some very funky housing, painted all sorts of bright colorful shades of neon. This was definitely yuppie land - so we decided to endulge at one of the local Cafes and were quite happy with the fresh food and beer they served.
Surray Hills and Paddington
While at the cafe, the rain finally stopped. The clouds began to lift and the sun starting trying to break through. So back to the city we wandered to explore Surray Hills. While our morning was spent on the western side of the city, we discovered the walk back to the eastern side (where Surray Hills was) didn’t take nearly as long as we expected. Sydney was actually quite small in physical distance between places! We found Surray Hills to be a pretty fancy part of town. Lined with expensive hotels and nicely kept buildings, we noticed that most things were well out of our backpaper price range. Our stroll through Surray Hills landed us on Oxford Street. We headed east on Oxford Street until we hit the Paddington area, which is where we decided to grab dinner. We found a nice Vietnamese restaurant that had good service, generous portions and tasty, spicy meals. Pleased with our dinner, we wandered west on Oxford toward our hotel and found a bar about halfway down. After a few drinks at the pub and some conversation about our travels. A few more blocks we went to our hotel to get some peaceful rest, finally staying up until midnight and becoming fully adjusted to the timezone we were in.
More to come tomorrow!
Funny Things
First, let’s get our translations correct.
a “Hotel” in Sydney = “Bar” in America
Chips = Fries
Short = Small
Tall = Large
Silly Thai restaurant names:
Thai me Up
Thaitanic
ThaiLand
Other silly store names:
Bite Me Burger
Holy Sheet (a sheet store)
Curl Up and Dye (a hair place)
… and be warned you coffee lovers… Ordering Coffee as you know it will yield strange results! (Ice Coffee = Latte with Ice Cream apparently, and so on…)
