Sydney

Sydney glorious Sydney! Sean and I headed down last Friday to see the famous Sydney. As promised in the many books I’ve read about Australia it was fantastic and completely different from Brisbane. We stayed at the Lord Nelson Brewery and Hotel in The Rocks. The Rocks is a lovely historical neighborhood by the Harbor Bridge and the Opera House.

I was most excited to go to Sydney for the food and it did not disappoint. On our way to the hotel from Circular Quay we found a very adorable and very authentic German restaurant - the waitresses were dressed like the St. Pauli girl, but with less emphasis on the cleavage, and the waiters had real lederhosen on. The beer selection was fantastic. I really enjoyed the Mango weizen. It was a take on the light beer and lemonade, but hefeweizen with mango juice. I highly recommend it.

On Saturday we walked around Circular Quay, the Opera House, the Botanical Gardens, Paddington and Darlington. After walking around town and exploring for most of the day we had a drink at our hotel/brewery. It was a perfect afternoon to sit outside in the sun with a tasty beer.



Saturday night we went out for a special dinner at Spice Temple. I’ll have to dedicate a separate post to our dinner; it was one of the best dinners I’ve had in a long time (thank you, Lynn!).

I learned a little factoid from watching Muriel’s Wedding - Sydney is known as the city of brides. Holy cow, it is completely true. We saw at least 10 wedding parties on Saturday. I think we saw four white stretch Hummer limos in the space of 45 minutes. One really strange thing we saw was a male street performer in a purple zoot suit salsa dancing with a female dummy. I kept thinking to myself, you couldn’t find one woman to dance with you? It was really bizarre.

Sunday we took the ferry to Manly along with everyone else in Sydney, or at least that’s how it felt. The ferry ride was beautiful and we got to see a lot of Sydney Harbor. Manly was surprisingly nice - touristy for sure, but a lovely beach. We split fish and chips for lunch; another really good meal.

I hope we can spend some more time in Sydney in the future, but we are out of time on this trip. I was glad to have a weekend here in Brisbane before heading off to the Whitsunday Islands and Bali and then home to Seattle.