Sydney Day 6: The Rocks Museum, Paddy's Markets and sunrise

I’m sitting in the sun in a bach near the beach with a cat. Ahhhhh.

Though the cat’s kind of needy. Follows you EVERYWHERE.

I caught the bus into town yesterday, which involved picking a random bus stop and asking the lovely old lady sitting there if this was the bus stop into town. She said no, I had to change buses at the main road. At the main road, unfortunately, there was a looong line for the bus (at 10am too!) so I didn’t get the first bus even though it was a long bendy one. That was all right, though, because I got a seat on the next one and was able to see out the window.

We had to wait for a drawbridge to let two boats through, which was exciting even though I couldn’t see that much, and then I got into town.

I’d been meaning to go to the Rocks markets, so I walked up through them. They were mostly food markets yesterday and they smelled amazing, with meatballs and Turkish somethings and sushi and cupcakes. I ventured on to the Rocks Discovery Museum and spent a good few hours looking at all the old things and reading the history. The curator gave a talk on the history of the police in the Rocks, which was very interesting – when the police first started, the only people they had to recruit were convicts so the police were convicts themselves.

The food stalls were still there and still smelled amazing when I emerged.

I ate my lettuce and cheese sandwich.

And then I bought a Mini Monet cookies and cream cupcake, which was very cute with pointy icing. I should have taken a photo.

Next stop on my itinerary were Paddy’s Markets at Haymarket. I took the train and walked into the huge building, with its hundreds of stalls and the largest fans I’ve ever seen turning slowly above. I have to say I’m terrible at shopping – I spend an age staring at everything, trying to decide if I should get anything and, if so, which thing I should get. I needed sunglasses, though, so I got a nice pair of those, and pondered whether I should get a necklace watch or not, but none of them were exactly right (ooh! Ooh! I should make one!!!! Hmmm how would I do that...).

A lot of the stuff you can get in virtually any market in any large city in the world. That depressed me a bit. I’d quite like to get something uniquely Australian, but I don’t want a boomerang or a didgeridoo (I have one of each already) or an obvious Sydney/Australia T-shirt (would I actually wear it? Being Australian and all... :P). Still looking to find the perfect souvenir...

The sun was moving through the sky way too fast. I moved on to the PINK jewellery shop, which is entirely pink if you hadn’t guessed, and quite shocking when you go past in the bus. There I spent and interminable time looking at all the jewellery before deciding on a pretty bird necklace. Maybe you need souvenirs to remind you of particular memories – not generic stuff. That’s what the word souvenir means, anyway – to remember.

Which brings me to another thing: half the people in Sydney are speaking French! Maybe there’s a French cruise ship in or something, but it confuses me. Why are there so many French people? I also heard a guy speaking Hebrew on the bus, and lots of what I think is Italian and Chinese, but I didn’t know there was a large French population.

No time for anything else (even though I wanted to trawl the malls), so I set out on expedition to find the bus. I’m determined not to use a map, so I got a bit lost but found my stop in the end. Then it was just a long bus trip and a short walk back here, where we had insanely expensive fish and chips and tried to get the DVD player to work.

No luck. We were tired anyway.

And now.... this morning! (One and a half posts in one!) I dragged The Angel up to watch the sun rise from the beach. It was absolutely beautiful. Then I talked to the One Who Speaks Russian on Skype (she deigned to speak English, thank goodness). Otherwise, not much happening so far :)