Hello, I'm back. Sorry for the long radio silence; Michael and I agreed that we would have a proper vacation while on Green Island by going completely off the grid. But no news is good news, right? Right. And now there's lots of news to catch up on, so let's just get started, shall we?
I won't be able to post about all of the stuff we've been up to for the past week-ish all at once, so you'll just have to deal with getting it a bit behind, albeit in order. It's like time travel! To give a quick overview, our last day in Sydney was on Monday, July 6. Then we flew to Cairns and took a boat directly to Green Island for Tuesday 7 - Friday 10. For the evening on Friday 10 and Saturday 11 we were in Cairns, then we flew to Brisbane on Sunday, July 12, for Michael's conference, which is where I'm writing from right now. But we'll get to that in a minute. For now, let me take you back in time...oooohhhh....
Our last day in Sydney involved some errands and some relaxing in preparation for our upcoming vacation. In the morning, we had breakfast in the room with the last bit of our accumulated grocery-store stash and then did our laundry at a local laundromat. Luckily, the place had huge industrial-strength dryers, so the laundry didn't take too long. For lunch, we went to a narrow little Chinese place on Victoria Street called Fu Manchu. They have long communal steel tables with bright red stools, which are not the most comfortable to sit on, but the food is great. Since the weather was still a bit chilly, we both had a huge bowl of noodle soup with tofu and greens, which was delicious and soul-restoring. Also got some pumpkin gow gees (basically, steamed potstickers) on the side with plum vinegar sauce.
In the afternoon, more errands: Michael got his hair cut, since it was starting to look like a cauliflower, and I went down to Oxford Street to get my nails done. And we went back to The Artery to buy our painting (yay!) which they're going to hold for us until we get back to Sydney in August. I must say, it's kinda neat to be in a gallery and to see a painting on the wall with a "Sold" sticker on it, and to know that we're the ones it was sold to. Probably shouldn't make a habit out of it, though.
After that, we had time for one last stroll around before sunset --- went up Victoria Street towards the residential neighborhood of Woolloomoloo (I love saying that!), which is on some hills overlooking the city, and took the stairs down from there to the level of the harbour. We walked from the base of the stairs down towards the Botanic Gardens, and on the way there stumbled on a little food kiosk / throwback to the 1940s: Harry's Cafe de Wheels. They've been serving pie and mash on that spot since World War II, and all the celebs come by to have their pictures taken. Michael insisted that we stop and get a veggie pie, which frankly wasn't all that good, but sometimes it's the context that matters more. We made it to the Gardens about an hour before closing and visited all the highlights one last time: the flying foxes, the Wollemi Pine, and the succulent garden. I saw another golden orb spider, and was able to get a pretty good picture of it:
Trust me, it's big.
We went from the Gardens down to the Harbour, intending to find somewhere nice to sit and have a drink, but the sun had already gone down and it was a little too cold (and too touristy) to sit by the water. So we headed back up Pitt Street in search of a cool bar that we'd passed earlier in the week. It's called The Vault, which sounds good, but their grammar is awful:
Plus it wasn't nearly so cool on the inside as it had looked from the outside. We had one drink each but left somewhat unsatisfied.
So, where to next? And where should we get dinner? I remembered a New York Times article from a little while ago profiling some new gastro-pubs in Surrey Hills, which is pretty close to our hotel, just on the other side of Oxford Street. We picked a likely-looking one from the article and found it...but it's closed on Mondays. Of course. Argh. In the midst of a, er, lively discussion about where to try next, we realized that we were just across the street from Billy Kwong, and it was just opening time (6 pm). Could there possibly be a table available? Yes! Completely excited and totally unprepared, we were seated at a tiny two-top in the window and welcomed with a little bowl of spiced peanuts. Ooh, this is gonna be good...
And it was. It's basically the French Laundry of Chinese food. Well, maybe not quite, but close. The restaurant is microscopic, with seating for maybe 40 people at the outside, and they don't take reservations at all. So you just have to show up and hope you get lucky, like we did. Kylie Kwong, the chef, is very concerned with environmental issues and sustainability in addition to food, so she has her own label of biodynamic wines. We had the white.
The food was awesome. There wasn't a ton of vegetarian stuff (as one of our friends says, the Chinese think pork is a vegetable), but we definitely had enough choices for a great meal. We started off with beetroot and carrot salad with two perfectly poached eggs on top and a fantastic tangy dressing. It was awesome --- a perfect blend of sweet and earthy and sour. Maybe we'll try to see if there's a recipe for it in one of her books so we can work it into our Thanksgiving menu. We got two mains: Deep-fried silken tofu (crispy on the outside, creamy on the inside) with a roasted tomato sauce and a medley of sauteed wild mushrooms with Chinese spices. I was really looking forward to the mushrooms, since I love 'em, but that dish was actually the least exciting of all the ones we had. The tofu, on the other hand, was delightful. Almost makes me want to invest in a deep fryer, but I still think that's the sort of thing best left up to the experts. On the side, we had one of the seasonal specials: green beans in spicy miso sauce. Like the starter, it was a perfect blend of flavors, with the sweetness from the miso tempered by the spiciness from the chilis. Wow. Yum.
Somewhat blurry interior view of the restaurant kitchen, since we didn't want to ruin the ambiance by using the flash:
Completely happy and sated, we faced the not-so-happy task of packing everything up so that we could make our early flight to Cairns the following day. We managed somehow, mostly through Michael's perseverance since I was a bit laid out from dinner, and headed to bed almost immediately after.
Fauna of the day: rainbow lorikeet, perched outside of a house in Wooloomoloo:
Plus, a little late, here's a map to get you oriented to where we've been staying/eating in Sydney. The neighborhood is called Darlinghurst. Our hotel is marked on here, and you can see Darlinghurst Street and the parallel Victoria Street (with lots of restaurants) and Oxford Street (main gayborhood drag (pun intended)) here as well. Hyde Park and the Botanic Gardens are are to the west, and the Harbour is north of that.
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