Sydney Day 5: Sydney Tower and the move north

Aaah!!! I never posted this! Here it is incredibly late :)

My goal today was the Sydney Tower and shopping. I thought I’d do the Tower in the morning, and then have the rest of the day for window shopping.

Funny how things never go to plan.

I wanted to buy a ticket for something on Tuesday (come back on Tuesday to see what it is mwa ha), took the bus into town, then the train to Wynyard St. Still didn’t see any Matrix subway stations. The subway here is interesting – it’s mostly underground, but comes out high above ground in random places, like Circular Quay. I guess this is possible because the CBD is on a hill.

I got my ticket, walked to Circular Quay and tried to figure out how to get to Sydney Tower. I guessed the approximate station might be Central, so I caught a train there, decided I was way too far south, caught another train to Town Hall and then couldn’t figure out where the thing was. You would think it would be easier to find a giant pointy thing, but no.

By this time I was hungry, so I had lunch. I’m ashamed to say I went to Hungry Jack’s, just to see what it’s like and because it seemed very Australian. It is Burger King, with the same branding and logo as NZ-ten-years-ago, but it’s called Hungry Jack’s. The default meal size is small, which I didn’t realise, but that was fine because the burger was HUGE. I now understand why it’s called a Whopper – it never really made sense to me before.

Finally I located the Tower, on top of a very upmarket mall with such stores as Gucci and Zara. There was a motion-master ride through Australia, which was incredibly jarring but which I quite enjoyed, and then we had to go through a metal-detector before we were allowed up the tower.

The trunk of the tower is a lot smaller than Auckland’s Sky Tower, and the lifts are triangular (imagine the pieces in trivial pursuit). There aren’t any windows in the lift, which is probably good considering I got a bit of vertigo last time I went up the Sky Tower.

The observation deck has the most incredible views out to the eastern beaches, Botany Bay, the Blue Mountains, the north shore and the harbour as well as the city itself. I took a picture out every single window, which took ages because people were sitting in some of them and I wanted to do them in order.

The Angel rang at about 3pm to say she was home, and would I be able to come back as I had the key? No time for shopping then, so I missed a bus by ten seconds, waited another ten minutes for the next one and spent an interminably long time getting back to Leichhardt. Then we collected our stuff and joined a real Sydney traffic jam over the Harbour Bridge to the north shore.

At this moment there is a cat called Nelson curled up beside me who is missing his usual people but seems happy enough to adopt me. I’m happy enough to let him. The house we’re house-sitting is a great little place two minutes walk from the beach, so I’m looking forward to some good days ahead.

After I go window shopping, of course.