Shopping Mall, Museum and the Park

Sydney, Australia May 7 to may 14, 2005

Monday May 9th. 2005. Shopping Mall, Museum and the Park.

I got up very early this morning and at the break of dawn I put on my rubber shoes and went jogging. Referring to the map there is a garden called Chinese Garden close to my hotel. I jogged and headed for that direction. There were already other joggers around then. As I went pass this Chinese Garden, I noticed that it is connected to a bigger pedestrian area with shops, restaurants and others along the sides. I continued through and ended up in the Darling Harbour area. Jogging around Darling Harbour once through, from my hotel and back takes about an hour or so. It is definitely a pleasant discovery as I now have a nice place to do an exercise circuit in the mornings.

After a leisurely breakfast we got ready and went out. We walked to the Pitts Street Mall close to our hotel. It was overly crowded with people. It is the main shopping area of Sydney. We came across a small Opal Museum in the mall. They have exhibits showing how opal is mined and what tools they use to extract the opal. There were also displays of the tools used to make jewelry out of the opals.

We continued. We walked through Hyde Park on the way to Sydney Museum. They had a special exhibition of Egyptian artifacts. We did not go to that section as we wanted to view Australian exhibits. We later walked back towards Pitts Street Mall, through Hyde Park, stopped to rest and ‘people-watch’ in the park for a while. There were people walking through the park in full office attire and I noticed some of them walking back later with packets of food/lunch in their hands. Some sit on the benches or on the grass and have their lunch, at the same time feeding the birds. Some others were jogging or doing exercises. Others were just strolling along and yet others, tourists like us, were posing and taking pictures. You can immediately tell they are tourists by the way of dressing, mannerism and the stuff they have in their hands (camera, map or guide books, bottled drinks etc). Just like other cities, New York, San Francisco, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Tokyo and so on, there are the homeless, the vagabonds, drifters etc. I noticed a few but they are quite scarce here, not like New York or London, where you can find them at almost every street corner and in public places. I found out later that the jobless here gets allowances and subsistence from the state, and that helps them to get by.

We continued. We walked back to the Mall area and had a light meal in one of the underground food-courts. We discovered that the underground shopping mall stretches in all directions and one ended very close to our hotel. I know now that you can move around that part of the city through the underground malls and don’t have to walk on the street level to get around, especially on rainy days. These underground malls in fact connect the railway stations to the shopping complexes. One can get lost down there!!

When we got tired of walking, went back to the hotel for a rest and me, as usual, on this laptop. It gets dark here pretty early in the evening this time of the year. After awhile on the laptop I took a nap and was surprised when I woke up that it was already dark. I thought I have had sleep for a long time but realized that it was only half past five in the evening and I only slept for less than an hour!! Ah well, you do get surprises now and then.

We went out for dinner at an Indian Restaurant in Darling Harbour, and had a table in front and outside facing the harbour. Almost all the tables outside are taken up first before people sit at tables inside the restaurant. It is all the same with the other restaurants in the area. They have quite a selection on the menu but quite pricy, because it is by the harbour? The food was nothing much really!!

We were back in the hotel in less than half an hour after a slow stroll but too slow to work out what we just had, heh heh.


MKI Ramblings Unlimited
Sydney, Australia