Tracey came through again, picking an excellent neighborhood and location for our month long stay in Sydney, one of the top ten most “livable cities” in the world! We are staying on Bourke Street in Surry Hills just bordering Darlinghurst. Just a short walk down the street on our first evening took us to Dead Ringer, a new, great spot for a cocktail and a couple small bites.
On our first morning we woke to steady rain and returned the rental car to the airport, not needed for our month exploring Sydney. The train returned us quickly to the city from the airport. It is so convenient to have a very good public transportation system!
In the afternoon, we went and joined our neighborhood gym Plus Fitness, for the month. This should help alleviate some of the added baggage acquired during our trip down Australia’s east coast the last few weeks! And the gym will be needed… so many restaurants and so little time. I understand that Sydney has over 4,500 and we will do our best to sample as many as we can! I lived in Chicago for 17 years with over 7,000 restaurants and I didn’t quite do them all, either!
On Friday night we had an excellent dinner at The Chicken Institute in Surry Hills, a Korean inspired restaurant. We had two buckets of chicken and kimchi fries, washed down by a good Australian Shiraz. We were fortunate to sit at the bar and to be served by a wonderful bright young lady, Vina from Indonesia. She is a student studying accounting at university in Sydney. With her people skills and intelligence, she will go places for sure!
It is springtime in Sydney and the weather on Saturday was fantastic, upper 60s and sunny. After our first gym workout we headed to an opening event at Sydney’s Fringe Festival, Ignite. This particular event, of the month long festival, was a few hours of musicians doing their original music at restaurants and cafes on Saturday afternoon on Stanley Street in the Darlinghurst neighborhood, a great little city spot. The music was fun and we will need to return here to check out these restaurants a bit more.
We did stop at a small Japanese spot for some udon and sashimi before heading down to the Sydney Opera House for our first show there. The show, The Spoken Word with Henry Rollins, a monologue, is not the first Opera House show I thought I would see. The concert hall was filled to hear a bit of truth serum regarding all that is going on in the US with politics, Australia, as well as other issues of import, for all of us to do what we can to make the world a better place. Good stuff! 
We did make it back to the Opera House to hear “A Sea Symphony”, an outstanding symphony with text from Walt Whitman poems.
We had a great time on our first Sunday in Sydney exploring the Newtown neighborhood. The hood is relatively young, so many restaurants, pubs, live music and beautiful old and new architecture of homes and storefronts. We attended an organized “official” pub crawl as part of the Fringe Festival along King and nearby streets. Sort of like an organized Bradenton – Sarasota “Safari” we have done with friends back home on rainy days, but with live, original music along the way. We made several stops including music and drinks at Black-Sheep, Midnight Special, Newtown Social Club and Marlborough. Some good musicians along the way included Little Georgia (for a listen click here ==> Little Georgia)…reminded us a bit of Betty Fox with her passion! We met our US friends we met in the Blue Mountains, Swe De and Lori on the crawl!
On Monday, back to the workout for the sins of the weekend. On top of that fun, we made it to the dentist for our “six month” cleaning and checkup. One thing you miss from living in one location are the key relationships, including doctors and dentists but we had some great recommendations from our Aussie mates. Getting our US dental care plan to pay for the dental cleaning was like “pulling teeth”.
Spendi
ng the month in one place like Sydney gives us some time to do some travel planning. There is a Vietnam Consulate here so we were able to secure our photos and visas for Vietnam, which is a one month stop on our upcoming trip through Southeast Asia. The Vietnam visas are now good for one year and allow unlimited number of border crossings.
We also found a terrific doctor to top us up on necessary immunizations for our upcoming travels and some routine blood tests to check on the health. A stop at a local pharmacy amazed us when comparing the cost of common allergy / asthma medicine. It was ten times cheaper than in the US and served up over the counter with no prescription necessary! So not only are the drugs less expensive but you do not have to go through the costly, time consuming doctors visit, all for a $6 medication that any decent pharmacist can advise. Overall we have been very pleased with the various healthcare services we have experienced in Australia and New Zealand! All is good!
On our trip back from the Vietnam Consulate we walked through parts of the Kings Cross neighborhood of Sydney, known infamously as Sydney’s “Red Light District”…many interesting “sites” to say the least! Some friends and musicians we met along the way in Cairns gave us a list of venues to visit for food and music in Kings Cross.
Speaking of musicians, we heard a couple of other very good ones while in Sydney. We went to the Mike Noga album release show at the Brighton Up Bar. Mike was good, but we loved JEP and DEP, a two-person group made up of Jessica Black and Darren Cross. We had a great time talking to them and met them later during our stay for one of Darren’s solo shows at the Newtown Social Club. Here we heard a few songs off of his outstanding new album, Xantasia (for a listen click here ==> Darren Cross). After, we had a drink with Darren and Jess at the “Whiskey Bar” next door, no name on door, bustling inside. Like Adelaide and Melbourne, Sydney has relaxed their liquor laws to permit the opening of some very cool “small bars”.
Darren provided us with an outstanding list of restaurants and music venues, many of which we experienced! This included the Erko Hotel in Erskineville which neighbors Newtown. What a great pub and good locally sourced food and brews. I had the medium heat wings. These were large wings and the “medium” heat was fantastic! Seasoned with habanero pepper and BBQ! I needed a cold 150 Lashes pale ale to wash them down!
Jess provided us with some theatre tickets and Lebanese restaurant recommendations in Surry Hills that were fantastic! (wine courtesy of Lyn and Warren – Thank you!) So wonderful to meet great people like Darren and Jess!
More Eating…More Good Restaurants
We have been able to pare back the eating out a little bit during our stay in Sydney, good and bad! We are still using the juicer and we’ve perfected some salads, a vegetable stir-fry, a baked vegetable casserole and homemade pizza…actually making a gluten free crust from scratch! However, there is a large Asian population in Australia and we’ve managed to eat plenty of Asian food including Thai, Malaysian, Vietnamese. There are many Thai restaurants and we stopped in a few during our stay for either lunch or dinner! The Japanese “fast food” stops around the city are numerous and we made numerous stops for sushi and sashimi. We dined out at Don Don on Oxford Street, a good value spot for some donburi, tempura, udon, and sashimi. We had terrific Malaysian at Mamak! We approached the restaurant and the line was stretched outside the venue down the street at 18:15. No reservations were taken here but the line moved quickly. We were in at 18:30! We are glad we hit this spot and the great selection of curry chicken, shrimp sambal, and roti. We also had dinner at Xage, a very good Vietnamese restaurant in Surry Hills with a bit of an eclectic flair. Finally, we had lunch in the Chinatown area at Chinese Noodle Restaurant, a local’s spot. This was one of many great recommendations from our Aussie musical mate Darren Cross. All of this dining is helping us prep for our upcoming stops across Asia!
Of course we did hit some non-Asian restaurants. One great dinner was at a very popular Caribbean restaurant, Rosie Campbell’s. As well as some good food, we had good drinks including a Zombie for Tracey and an ice cold Red Stripe for me!
We enjoyed brunch at a popular spot in Surry Hills, Reuben Hills. They have a very cool unique menu! We tested the “Really F*****g Great Fried Chicken” and Huevos Divorciados (soft fried eggs, red and green salsa, charro bean, smoked tetilla, tostoda)!
We held out for Indian as long as we could! Tracey found the number one Indian not only in Surry Hills but also Sydney…Maya da dhaba…and it delivered! We had the tandoori shrimp for an entree and the spice was perfect! Tracey went to her tried and true Chicken Makhani and I had the Chana Masala.
Sydney Sightseeing and Excursions
We are usually drawn to botanic gardens and we made a couple of trips to the Sydney Royal Botanic Garden on some beautiful spring days! We continue to learn more and more about the flora and fauna of Australia and this garden just off the CBD and fronting the waterfront harbor is a beautiful place to do it. We always find the free tours in the gardens worthwhile! By the time we leave Australia we may be able to give these tours!
We enjoyed the Sydney “free walk”. Again these are great ways to learn about cities on foot. This tour which started at Sydney’s town hall was over three hours and our guide was a history major…a fantastic tour!
Before the walk we walked through the Queen Victoria Building, spectacular old building converted to a modern shopping venue. We had a long black and flat white at the Old Vienna coffee shop. The pastries were tempting but we resisted!
The walking tour continued to Hyde park. It is a beautiful park in the middle of the CBD used to be the site for racing horses and camels. You will notice that the streets surrounding the park are in the shape of an oval! (An interesting aside, while camels are not indigenous they were brought to Australia and used in the Red Centre expedition. They were left to die, but of course a few did not. The rest is history, there are now millions of them in the wild across Australia and apparently more than anywhere else on the world). And a few other interesting facts:
- Hyde Park used to be the site where aboriginals solved disputes…with spears! This drew crowds of non-aboriginals to view the events.
- Sydney Harbour is the deepest natural harbour in the world. At one time it was a river that then flooded the valley during the ice age melt.
- Australia has the second highest standard of living behind Norwegians.
- Emu and kangaroo are Australia’s national animals. They cannot walk backwards and also walk on two feet. Their statues sit atop the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
- Australia has over 50 million kangaroos! Twice as many Roos as people!
I don’t want to spoil the tour for you when you visit Australia so I will stop there.
One gorgeous Sunday afternoon we headed out to Sydney’s beautiful Bondi Beach coastline. At the beach the “Festival of the Winds” was being held. A great crowd and many kites! We did part of the spectacular Bondi to Coogee Coastal Walk, passing by some of the damaged coast from the winter storms that we had experienced when driving up the east coast of Australia. This storm included waves of over 25 feet!
Another fun area to walk through is the Darling Harbour area. After a walk to and through the area we took the ferry around to the Sydney Harbour under the Sydney Bridge and past the Opera house…a beautiful excursion!
The Sydney Tower with its awesome views of the entire Sydney area is must do. The day we visited the tower the skies were crystal clear. It was also helpful to visit after we had been in the city for a couple weeks as we were able to appreciate what we had been seeing at street level!
On the way walk home from the Tower we stopped by St Mary’s Cathedral. It is the longest church in Australia and really is amazing. It has a beautiful reflecting pool out front.
And no visit is complete to Sydney without visiting the Manly Beach area. This area is on the northern side of the Pacific Ocean’s entrance to the Sydney Harbour. We took the ferry to Manly Beach on another beautiful sunny day. 
Tracey picked a great spot for lunch at The Pantry , right on Manly Beach! Great food and a great place to relax with a glass of wine, grilled shrimp and seared tuna salads. We hiked a bit of the beautiful cliff lined coastline along the Manly Heads before the late afternoon ferry back to the Sydney CBD.
The Sydney Marathon and Recovery at “The Rocks”
As many folks know, I “like” running….to use the term loosely. So it was great to see that during our stay in Sydney that the Sydney Marathon was being held. Even better, there was a 4k run over the famous Harbour Bridge to the Sydney Opera House associated with it the same Sunday morning. This was also good because I had not been running and only had three weeks to train. When it’s all said and done, I was able to put in a little training, starting from “zero”, to be able to complete the run. I must say it was pretty cool to be able to do this run through this magnificent city and a couple of its icons!
It was a cloudy start to the morning of the race. Crews were out in front of our building at 4:30 am blocking the street off for the marathon portion which traveled up Oxford Street and through our neighborhood. The marathon started two hours before my race so I saw the marathon leader pass with the cameras and police escort as I walked out the door. He was of course on the just over “two-hour marathon pace”. (Ironically we saw the last place marathon “runner” on our way back home near our place on the 6:30 pace, with the police escort bringing up the rear right behind him).
Anyway, I was out the door at 7:30 am to take the train over to the other side of the Harbour for the run over the bridge to the opera house. 34,000 participants in the marathon, half marathon, 10k and 4k. I wisely chose the 4k having not run much since Tracey and I completed the Medoc Bordeaux Marathon last September.
It was a fun run, over the bridge and to the opera house with Tracey meeting me at the finish. I think she walked as far as I ran since she walked down to the finish at the Opera House from our digs. 🙂 Watching these races are so fun for the spectators…not! But It is spectacular to see the leaders and their incredible pace as well as the runners that tough out the 26 miles!
You always need to refuel after a race, even if it is just 4km. So we spent the afternoon having a wonderful time exploring the hotels/pubs in the Rocks area.
We started out with a lunch at the Hero of Waterloo, known for its live jazz on lazy Sunday afternoons. A great old pub and beautiful old building! Then we stopped in at the Irish Mercantile Hotel on George Street for a pint. Then in the pouring rain, onto the Lord Stanley Brewery Hotel. We decided it was time to head home but heard some good music at the Orient Hotel on George Street. A band doing some great U2 covers. We also met our friend Swe De who had some friends visiting from the US, Justin and Michelle. So we had a couple beers and great conversation before heading back to Surry Hills for some nutrition at Vacanza Pizzeria! A great way to close a fun weekend in Sydney!
More Music and Spirits…
I know this is sounding redundant, but we enjoyed the “Rocks” so much that on the following Sunday after the race , we went back to explore more music and pizza! We love live music, both original and good covers, and Sydney has a lot of it.
We also love U2’s music so we headed back down to The Rocks area and The Orient Hotel to hear the U2 Elevation — Outstanding! The band mostly played U2 but a bit of Van Morrison and Men at Work thrown into the mix. We then headed out to the infamous Freddie’s Pizza, known of course for its pizza but also for its nearly 24/7 live music! What a fun place! Then working our way home, we stopped at Shady Pines in Darlinghurst. Again, another small bar with no name on the door. Inside it reminded us of a Wisconsin bar with taxidermy wildlife on the walls, but of course with an Aussie flair.
One of our favorite pubs in Sydney was in Surry Hills, the Wild Rover. This is another place that has a very discreet sort of hidden entrance but when the door opens the terrific warm bar appears. Many types of whiskey here, I tried a rye that was excellent served up by Evan and Freddy. A great place for cocktails! This is also a great place to play trivia. We didn’t finish last, but we did meet some wonderful fun folks from Spain, England, Columbia, and the US. They, of course, won but we enjoyed a few drinks with them post trivia and followed up with some pool at another neighborhood bar in Darlinghurst, Kinselas until 2 am!
In the same area one evening we visited Play Bar which has music many nights. Here we met some great mates from Perth that offered to show us around when we make our visit there.
Finally, we made a stop at “The Basement” in Sydney for an open mic night. The Basement has long been a decent music venue in Sydney and we heard some very talented musicians! We enjoyed dinner just before at “The Rook”. The Rook is located on the seventh floor of a building down in the CBD, close to the Sydney tower. No signs out front, just a small board listing what is on each floor! This is a place you would not find if you were not looking for it. So it does a great business by word of mouth! We enjoyed the Toastie Mountie and lobster and chorizo croquettes!
So long to Sydney…
We worked out every other day while in Sydney and it was kind of bittersweet leaving Justin and his wonderful Plus Fitness gym. We didn’t lose much weight but that is a win as we gained a “little” muscle mass and still ate a lot of good food across Sydney!
The last night in Sydney, we were back to the Chicken Institute for a bucket of chicken a bottle of wine, and a visit with Vina our favorite Sydney waitress!
Sydney is always rated as one of the most livable cities in the world! The city itself is full of energy, youth, young professionals, and people of all stripes and walks of life! And of course we quickly came to love it and all that it has to offer. A month of “living ” in Sydney gave us a good taste of it (pun not intended) and we can see ourselves returning here in our future!
And a few more Sydney pics…
