One day in Sydney

When I was first planning this trip, I was anticipating having just one day in Sydney and hoping we'd see enough to have some sense of the city. I think we've done that and now I even get to spend another couple of days here next week with Lorien.

I believe I left off with us about to walk across the Harbour Bridge. We did that and over on the other side were thinking of taking the train back across. The lady who worked in the train station encouraged us to buy a 24-hour pass; I imagine that for most tourists that would have been the right choice. Our next planned stop was to go to the Botanic Gardens, and we were discussing whether to take the train to Circular Quay (Key) and walk into the Gardens or go to King's Cross and walk back (through Wooloomooloo, which had it's appeal) to the Gardens. The lady came back and said:

Go to Circular Quay in the daytime, go to King's Cross at night. At King's Cross, you find good pubs, strip clubs; everybody needs to go to good strip clubs.

We ended up taking a ferry back across instead. Since we timed it wrong, we took the ferry to Darling Harbour instead of Circular Quay and so we learned that our hotel was incredibly close to Darling Harbour. The guide book I have from the library had a lot more restaurants listed in Darling Harbour and we had dinner at Zaaffran, an Indian restaurant where we sat on the balcony looking over the harbour. The appetizers were excellent; we had the palak patta chana aur aloo ka chaat and the makkai pakora. The dinner wasn't as notable; maybe because we were getting to be really tired, maybe because people started smoking around us.

Before dinner, we did make it to the Royal Botanic Gardens. I'm sure the plants were cool, but we were mostly interested in the birds. We saw a couple of ibises, a magpie (and one of the guys says that one of our co-workers was at Australian National University in Canberra and was regularly attacked by the magpies during mating season), some lorikeets, and huge numbers of big bats (technically flying foxes). We were there before dusk, but we still saw some of the them flying around.