Weekend in Sydney (the next-to-next-to-last)

No, I'm not headed out quite yet, but I am going to be doing some more traveling in the coming weeks. So I thought I'd make this weekend count. At the same time, I'm tired! I definitely needed some time to veg, and try to fight off the cold I can feel coming on.


These first photos are of the sunset at Coogee beach on Thursday night, when we had our combined barbecue and wine night.

On Friday I was a good girl and did some work, as well as numerous loads of laundry. Late night I made it out to the Abercrombie Hotel for Purple Sneakers. Interesting aspect of life in Sydney - almost none of the places called XYZ Hotel are actually hotels. Apparently, it's cheaper to get a liquor license if you are a hotel, presumably so that your drunken patrons have a place to pass out if necessary. However, you make more money if you use all your space to pack in people who are drinking, not sleeping. So in actuality Hotel = Bar. I've been told, however, that in order to maintain the status of hotel, they have to maintain at least one room that you could, theoretically, rent. My mission is clear: find these rooms. They have to be totally weird, and probably highly sketchy. Just my style. Anyway, it was fun checking out a new spot, and cool to be at a place that was playing music other than Justin Timberlake. Even if the vast majority of the crowd seemed to have been born in 1990.

On Saturday, Benedetta and I took the ferry over to Balmain, one of the suburbs in the Inner West. Again, interesting aspect of life in Sydney - there are places that it's much more convenient to get to by ferry. And also, they call their neighborhoods suburbs. I guess they're sort of like burroughs in NYC, as they have their own town councils, but they're generally a lot smaller. Anyway, Balmain used to be a center of ship building activity, and has a lot of cool old buildings. We wandered around the Saturday market there, and then had a coffee. Very nice.



On Sunday, I had brunch with the ladies who study abroad (Anne, Benedetta and Courtney). We went to Bills, which came highly recommended. But my experience was less than stellar, leading me once again to realize that when it comes to food, I'm just too damn American to adapt. Sunday night, a group of us went to Hugo's Lounge, which was my first trip to Kings Cross. It doesn't matter where you're from, you've gotta love $5 pizza and drinks. I liked the decor a lot, but the people watching was fantastic! Definitely a bunch of peacocks gathered to strut their stuff. Nicola and I danced for a bit, and then I went home and stayed up too late finishing the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer. Nothing like a trashy teenage vampire love story to round out the weekend.