sydney highlights

I think it's time to talk about Sydney. This is a city that I'd visited on a family vacation when I was 13, and while I remembered it fondly, I didn't have any particular desire to return. Thank goodness for the prompting of my husband to include it in our itinerary, because I quickly found that I'd been under-representing it to myself and others for the last 12 years. On the night that we arrived, we walked down to Circular Quay and were awestruck by the size and grandeur of both the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge. We were giddy with excitement, both because of these iconic Sydney landmarks and because of the inexpressibly magical quality about nighttime on the waterfront in a foreign city.

On the final day of our trip, we enjoyed a special lunch at the restaurant Waterfront, where I had what must be the best fish I've ever had in my life...and I'm no stranger to seafood. This was an excellent snapper, and Bryan shares the same sentiment about his swordfish. The view from our table roughly corresponds with the pictures above - bridge on the left, opera house on the right. Our only regret is that we didn't brush up on our dining etiquette before popping in at such a nice place. (Incidentally, I have since learned much from Wikipedia - apparently sushi is to be eaten in one bite, is not to be dipped in soy sauce, and should be eaten upside-down from the way that i've been used to enjoying it.)

Our second day in Sydney was devoted to Darling Harbour, a precinct on the west side of the city that is home to more interesting museums than can reasonably seen in a day. We devoted our limited time primarily to the Australian National Maritime Museum, where visitors can board a replica of Captain Cook's famous Endeavour and browse plenty of engrossing exhibits, including one about mythical creatures that seemed only loosely tied to the museum's nautical theme. My favorite was a series of photos and excerpts from the journal of a young American who joined a ship's crew for the 4-month voyage from New York to Sydney around 1905, part of a larger exhibition about the relationship between Australia and the US over the past 240 years. The above left picture is from our brief stop in the Chinese Gardens on the south end of Darling Harbour, where the surrounding walls keep out the construction sounds surprisingly well, though the skyline remains as a reminder of its urban setting.

And though this is most certainly not a highlight, I just can't conclude this blog without a reference to the hordes of bats that haunted our visit to Sydney. They live in the Royal Botanic Gardens (above), hanging from the trees during the day like heavy raindrops that seem likely to fall on passers-by walking underneath. We also had the pleasure of their swooping and screeches overhead at dusk as we passed through the Gardens on our way to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Yuck yuck yuck.

It's just occurred to me that I've left out two of my favorite places and will have to leave them for you to explore yourselves - the excellent Hyde Park Barracks Museum, where extensive archaeological probing has yielded evidence on the barracks' occupation by transported criminals, Irish girls orphaned by the potato famine, and a women's asylum, and the historic buildings of The Rocks neighborhood under the shadow of the bridge.

There's much to love about Sydney.

-rachel

melbourne highlights

Rather than thrust upon you an overly detailed account of our Australia trip, I've decided to mention a few highlights of each city. First up is Melbourne, where we spent our first 4 or 5 days (depending on how you count those travel "half days") in Australia. For those unfamiliar with Australia's geography, Melbourne is located in the state of Victoria, in the far southeastern corner of the country, and is just a quick hourlong flight from its rival Sydney just up the coast. Both cities are more northerly than our current home in Christchurch, which roughly shares a latitude with Hobart in Tasmania, so we experienced a welcome increase in temperature that provided the proper atmosphere for our vacation. We've wanted to visit Melbourne for a few years, as its riverside location, appreciation of historic buildings, and artsy culture make it feel like the cool older sibling of our beloved Minneapolis.

It's really a great city for walking, save for the congested shopping streets during peak times, and one of our highlights was a long stroll through the Royal Botanic Gardens and back downtown via a path along the Yarra River. In the gardens we came across the magnificent Shrine of Remembrance (below), built at the end of WWI to commemorate Australia's sacrifices during the war and later updated to honor WWII veterans and later peacekeeping missions as well. It's interesting to note how the locations that feature most prominently in Australia and New Zealand's war histories vary from those that I'm most familiar with as an American: Normandy and Iwo Jima replaced with Gallipoli, the North Sea, and the Cocos Islands. The dappled red facade of the visitor center beneath the memorial is actually a representation of poppies, an appropriate symbol of warfare as poppies were often the first signs of life to emerge from the blood-soaked battlefields. We just recently learned about their significance, as April 25 was ANZAC day and many New Zealanders wore a poppy pin in commemoration.

Highlight number two was a day spent at the melbourne zoo, apparently the third oldest zoo in the world and home to plenty of cuddly (at least in appearance) creatures native to Australia that Bryan had especially been looking forward to seeing. Their kangaroo exhibit allows visitors to get surprisingly close to the animals, as you can see in this picture of Bryan and his 'roo. We'd taken the tram to the zoo, but as the increasing number of strollers edged us toward the exit, we decided to walk back into the city in order to take advantage of a welcome opportunity to indulge in decent Italian food, abundant along Lygon St, and to pass through the University of Melbourne on the way. Back in the city, we ended our day at the Old Melbourne Gaol, where the famous outlaw Ned Kelly ended his days as well, to view his death mask and famous body armor. This appealed a bit more to Bryan than to me, but I found plenty of engaging anecdotes to retain my interest, such as the poor immigrant who, as a result of not speaking any English, didn't find out about his own execution until the morning of the event.

My final highlight is our brief exploration of the National Gallery of Victoria, a world-class art museum with such interesting artifacts as an ancient stone lion muzzle, with which I was much enamored. I used to think that I'd like to discover a cylinder seal while on an archaeological dig, but I've now upgraded this desire to a genuine lion muzzle instead. I'm also a big fan (though a complete amateur in my knowledge) of Japanese painting and calligraphy, and found much to admire in this one, Walking through a Pine Forest in Moonlight, Kuncan (1660). How can you not love Japanese scroll art? If I had Mary Poppins abilities, this is the kind of scene that I'd leap into. Those craggy mountains, the tumbling water, the little buildings settled right into the midst of it all...I admire the imagination of these artists.

It was a great trip, as you can see, and should we find our time in New Zealand extended we'll hopefully find our way back to the adorable laneways of Melbourne. We know we've missed out on things that we really should see, like the seaside suburb of St. Kilda, but they'll have to be saved for this future trip.

-rachel

why my friday night is awesome

bryan's at church tonight playing capture the flag with the youth group, all of our flatmates are out, and it's been two full years since i first discovered jane austen. i think that means that i'm officially beginning my first round of re-reads, starting with emma. better go put the tea kettle on...

-rachel

australia!

we've just returned from a fantastic week in australia, so as we sift through our pictures and organize our notes, i thought i'd share with you a couple of things we did differently on this trip that made it rock especially hard.

1. stayed in an apartment-style hotel room with a kitchenette, eating out for one meal per day and cooking for the other meal. in our house, breakfast doesn't really count as a meal (sorry, karen and joel - i know it kills you to hear that!), so we snacked on breakfast bars or stopped for coffee in the mornings.

2. packed lightly - just a daypack each plus a shopping bag between the two of us. we could get away with this for 8 days because our hotels had in-room washer/dryer units, so we packed for 4 days and wore each outfit twice. this method worked overall, but was a bit frustrating when the dryer in melbourne failed to work and we had to bring wet clothes along on the plane to sydney.

3. chose a hotel that was central enough to let us come back frequently throughout the day for naps and snacks. i was trying to avoid my typical grueling, museum madness "vacationing" this time around, and i think it worked.

4. explored by night - we arrived in sydney at dusk and contemplated waiting for morning to head downtown, but were later glad to have spent that evening by the light of the city and not the light of the hotel tv. the views of the opera house and sydney harbour bridge were breathtaking at night, and bryan claims that first evening as his favorite part of the entire trip.

5. visited two cities. we hope to return to australia soon, but if that doesn't happen for a while at least we've gotten a taste of a couple of different places. besides, bryan wanted to go to sydney and i wanted to go to melbourne, so this kept us both happy.

6. enforced a "no american restaurants" rule to make us explore beyond mcdonalds and subway. this resulted in some wonderful meals, most notably a very fine snapper and swordfish on the waterfront in sydney and an incredible artichoke pizza from +39 pizzeria and degustation in melbourne that's making my mouth water as i type this. mmm.

7. bought things we actually wanted as personal souvenirs. we enjoyed an exhibit at melbourne's acmi (australian center for the moving image) museum about the claymation film mary and max, so we bought the movie and watched it in the hotel one evening. in sydney, i bought a cute skirt that was on sale, knowing that when i wear it, i'll remember where it was from. sorry about the crappy postcards that the rest of you are getting :)

what are your great travel tips?

-rachel

our house...and the house that i wish was ours.

so this is our place (the building on the right). our flat is the second of six small townhouses squished together perpendicularly to fitzgerald avenue, one of the four major avenues named after early city superintendents that form a square around the central city area. it's all right, but the design is pretty blocky and when you look at the construction up close it seems a bit cheap. there are no locks on any of the interior doors (making the use of the bathroom during peak times a nerve-racking experience), and the front door requires a key to lock it from the inside. we've noticed quite a few of these less-than-attractive townhouses around the city, apparently the result of a rental housing boom in the last 10 or 20 years, and have been hearing about the city council's efforts to crack down on ugly housing construction. good move for them.

this is the house that i wish was ours - isn't it beautiful? i sneak a peek at the interior any time the lights are left on (a carryover habit from my snooping newspaper delivery days), and take great satisfaction in the victorian decorating style used inside. not my personal preference, but it suits the house well. we pass this house daily, as it's just a block from ours and along the river route that we take to church and to work.

-rachel

saturday morning at the metro

since oscar season has ended, taking with it the quality films that we had been viewing regularly every tuesday, we've initiated a new weekly date: saturday morning reading at a coffee shop. can you tell which one of us came up with this one? :) bryan's nice enough to go along with this indulgence of mine, as he's got some books to finish up for his internship anyway. this morning's locale was a hit - just check out the picture of our shared mixed berry and pumpkin chocolate muffins for the evidence of its greatness. my mom makes a mean pumpkin chocolate chip muffin, so this brought up fond memories of home.

the spot was cafe metro, a very cute coffee stop next to the town hall in victoria park, which we'd been meaning to visit for months. when a young dad and his 6ish-year-old boy got drinks and read the paper together, bryan and i, both suckers for cute parents and kids out in public together, gave collective sighs of adorableness.

i just love christchurch. i can't possibly leave in the next few months - there would be far too many great coffee shops left unvisited!

-rachel

cupcakes!

Three days a week I walk a different route to work in order to pick up the office mail from a PO box. While I fully expect to be paid for the extra 15 minutes that it takes me, I secretly look forward to the walk which leads me past a stretch of adorable antique shops and cafes. Though I'd passed by it many times before, somehow I had never noticed this little gem along the way, the Cupcake Parlour, which serves its collection of tasty treats on vintage-style dishes.

So I wondered who to take with me. If I were in Minnesota it would be an easy decision, as my friend Mandy and I are frequent samplers of the delicious items available at Cupcake near the University of Minnesota campus - this s'more cupcake (below) has been calling my name for a long, long time. But I'm not in Minnesota with Mandy, which made the decision-making process much more difficult. But a quick mention to a couple of friends from church led to what I think is a brilliant idea - hosting a month of cupcake tastings around Christchurch in an effort to determine the best cupcake in town.

So for four Saturdays in May, we'll invite the teenage girls to come with us to cupcake shops, bakeries, and farmer's market stands where we'll mutually indulge our sweet tooths and start the morning with some girly conversation. But the best part of the whole thing has been embracing my inner crafter with the help of the ever-awesome Alice, the youth intern who makes her own 50s-inspired clothing and whose primary method of transportation is a very cool periwinkle scooter. I'm jealous every time she rolls up to church wearing that helmet and leather jacket. We spent Monday afternoon shopping at boutique stationery stores, where we located a perfect designer paper with little retro cakes printed all over it, which we're planning to cut into strips to wrap around the gift boxes that we'll be making to house a homemade cupcake and an invitation for each girl. Should have them done by the middle of next week - if they turn out well, I'll post a picture. If not...just forget I ever mentioned them. :)

-Rachel