legislate everything !!!

On the weekend, Mark and I made a visit to the Justice and Police Museum down at Circular Quay, which had been on our weekend agenda for some time but delayed due to the surprise onslaught of very pleasant weather over the last couple of weeks.

The museum is housed in the building that held various different police and court functions throughout the 19th century, and has been restored to its former 1890s glory. Thus, you can wander through a reconstructed court room, police charge room and cells.



The cells were so dingy, and according to my guide leaflet, each would have held up to 12 prisoners at a time. There was only a tiny slit of natural light and each one was barely larger than my own small bedroom! It was a bit spooky.

What was good about the room set ups was that you could wander around everywhere - nothing was fenced off. You could go behind the desk and prod around, and there were lots of original 19th century court and police documents around so you could really get a sense of what went on there.

The rest of the building was more of a traditional museum set up, with exhibition sections on bushrangers, the development of forensic science and how it was used in some famous Australian cases, the history of the police in Australia, the development of various punishment methods, and a rather creepy room full of a collection of weapons confiscated from criminals over the years, the walls around the cases decorated with a disconcerting series of mugshots.



They were a random selection of mugshots of people arrested between 1913 and 1930 in Sydney. There were some really rather unpleasant faces staring out!

The main exhibition space was currently hosting the Sin City exhibition - a fascinating exposé of police corruption in Sydney, from the beginnings of the settlement through to the modern day. It's disturbing what has gone on, and the links between those at the top of the justice system and those at the top of the criminal world. Australia's criminal history (and present, to be honest) is fascinating to me as it has these big kingpin figures, gangs and crime families. The system of organised crime is much more open here, even a little more accepted. That's an aspect of life we just don't really get a lot of exposure to in the UK.
I remember when I first arrived here and started working at HCF, a girl at work was having a lot of trouble with a certain police station in Sydney, and some other colleagues were agreeing that that police station was corrupt and she would never get anywhere with them. At the time I just thought "naah that's silly", but after seeing this exhibition and the kind of stuff that's happened even in the last few years, it's made me wonder. There were endless bribes and high ranking police officials socialising with known criminal masterminds.
One of the most illustrative topics covered in the exhibition was the story of the Victoria Point Development in the 1970s. A property developer with dubious connections decided he wanted to knock down all the houses of Victoria Street in Pott's Point, to build a new complex. This would involve evicting many people from their houses, but they refused. The developer employed thugs, organised by a former NSW police detective, to terrorise the residents. Residents were threatened, assaulted in one case kidnapped. Eventually, video footage showed NSW police standing by in the street whilst the gang dragged people from their homes. Juanita Nielson, a publisher and vocal opponent of the development was mysteriously 'disappeared', presumed murdered, in 1975, an inquiry held during the 90s stating that police corruption had impeded the police investigation at the time.

The rest of the weekend was spent eating malaysian delights at Mamak in Chinatown (Mamak! Long time no see!), and brunching at South End on King Street (first time I've ever had food here in this homely little cafe - it was great!), in which the back room reminds me so much of the upstairs of Boston Tea Party in Bristol it's quite a delight. Also Doctor Who, of course. I don't know what I will do once Doctor Who finishes. What will I do on Sunday nights?? And Poirot has finished now too! I am frightened.

I want to make a food map of Sydney with all my favourite places on. Like a little guide to good things in each area, what they do, what they cost, what the vibe is like, who goes there, kind of thing. Best coffee, best takeaway, best for a chill out, best for a special occasion, all that. It will be very Inner West/Redfern/Surry Hills centred, I guess, but still. I might do it, even if only for my own reference! So I don't do UTTERLY DAFT THINGS again like forget about Mamak and leave it unvisited for the best part of a YEAR.
MEIN GOTT I love food. (P.S. I'm joining the gym. It's come to this!)

Seaplane birthday

Well I mentioned my birthday in the previous post, but I have not yet mentioned someone else who had a rather important birthday recently - Mark turned 30 back in the middle of May!

It was a really good day and I was really glad we were in Sydney for it as it gave me the chance to organise something really special that you just couldn't really match in the UK - a trip on the seaplane!



I booked us a 30 minute scenic flight with Sydney Seaplanes in Rose Bay. I also kept it a secret from Mark so he didn't really work it out until we got on the Rose Bay ferry from Circular Quay at 9am that morning! We had a lovely quiet 10 minute ferry trip across the harbour (it was a weekday and everything always seems very peaceful on a weekday when you are used to only doing stuff at weekends!), and we were a bit early so had a gander round the park in Rose Bay, which was full of Rose Bay yummy mummies watching their toddler groups or whatever it is you do when you are a Rose Bay yummy mummy.

Then we went over to the Seaplane office - I think Mark was just relieved we weren't doing the Harbour Bridge Climb or doing a skydive or something (vertigoooo)! Had a quick safety talk (exactly like you get on a big plane!) and boarded the plane ready to go! There were 7 of us on the plane - Mark & I, a couple and their young son from Melbourne, a guy on holiday from the UK who was really into light aircraft, and the pilot. It was actually really comfortable - the inside of the plane was really nicely done out and very clean and comfortable. Our pilot was great too - he told us all about the plane and pointed out everything we flew past so we knew what we were looking down at. It looked so different from the air!



We were off! It was a really clear day, but quite windy, which meant it was a little bumpy but on the upside, you could literally see for miles. Right out into the Blue Mountains inland, and out over endless sea the other side. It was great. We flew up over the harbour, along the cliffs and up the Northern Beaches, hugging the coast all the way.





Within 15 minutes, we were up flying over Pittwater, the water dotted with hundreds of boats. Kuringai National Park stretched out to our left, while we curved to the left and circled Barrenjoey Head and a magnificently gleaming Palm Beach.



Heading back south again, we ended on a loop over the Harbour and the towers of the CBD before coming into land in Rose Bay again.



After getting our land-legs back again, we took the ferry back to the city and made our way to Waterloo for lunch at Cafe Sopra, before home for a cup of tea. The evening was spent splashing out on an absolutely wonderful 8-course degustation at Bécasse in the city. Hopefully a memorable 30th birthday!

In which I become older, eat a lot, and be spoilt.

It's so waaarm today. Well, me with my English-person-temperature-tolerance thought it was warm anyway. I also saw a mega-cockroach scuttling across the pavement on the way home from work this evening, a sight normally reserved for summer, so I'm obviously not the only one that thought it was warm.










Mark and I walked the full Bondi-Coogee cliff walk over the June bank holiday weekend. It was actually the first time we'd ever done the whole thing in one go, which was surprising! We did it both directions for good measure, which took about 3 hours with a good bit of dilly-dallying thrown in. It was a glorious day for it, blazing sun, warm but not hot. I carried my jacket most of the way but wasn't sticky and uncomfortable. I guess something like this is much better done in winter than summer.
When we got back to Bondi we went straight to Fishmongers on Hall Road and STUFFED ourselves on fish and chips.

My birthday was fun! I especially liked having a birthday on the Saturday of a bank holiday weekend! And it was the Queen's Birthday Holiday so I was able to fib that I was actually the Queen and the day off was in my honour. We got up and went for breakfast at Black Star in Newtown - delicious pastries and coffee and it was great to sit out on the pavement in the winter sun. Then we hit the CBD for some shopping - I ended up with a great leather jacket and a new blouse - and we ate lunch at the antipasto bar in the food hall of David Jones. Cheese and antipasto plates and a glass of wine later, we headed to Surry Hills for a little more shopping and a coffee in Kawa on Crown Street, before heading back to Newtown for a cocktail in Corridor followed by dinner at new restaurant Bloodwood.

Bloodwood was a really good experience. It's quite an industrial looking place, with exposed bulbs and pipes along the ceilings, so a bit different to the average cosy restaurant set up. The menu consists of lots of smaller dishes made for sharing. We ordered cuttlefish salad, polenta chips with gorgonzola dipping sauce, mushrooms in red wine sauce and trifle for pudding (posh trifle!). Haha, I was on the phone to mi madre and told her I had "mushrooms on toast and then trifle" and realised it sounded like I'd been to a rubbish cafe in the 70s or something. It was good, honest!

For my birthday I got cake forks, cheese knife, cake slice, the new Snow Leopard operating system for Mac (haha, a bit like the Simpsons episode where Homer buys Marge the bowling ball that says "Homer" on it hahaha), and SEWING MACHINE(!!!) from Mark, sewing bits (including the best pin cushion EVER) and books from Mark's parents, and Alice in Wonderland DVD, jewellry and poems from mi madre and padre. What a lucky pie !!

After all that fun it was so hard to go back to work after the bank holiday! It doesn't help that my job has been a bit frenetic these past couple of weeks. It's the end of financial year on wednesday this week so the pressure is on!

Mark has been a bit under the weather this week - on Thursday morning he was in bed until 9.30am which is quite worrying for someone who considers 7am to be an EPIC lie in. He's a bit better today though so hopefully a great deal of marauding can be done at the weekend. We need sun to be healthy!

100th post!!!

I just finished writing the last post and clicked back to the main dashboard page when I noticed my blog stats:

'The Life of Pie' - 99 posts.

So this is my 100th post! That doesn't really seem like many, since I've had this blog since I guess May or June 2008. Oh, 2 years!

Just a couple of weeks time will mark my two year anniversary of being in Australia. It's strange how settled we've become in that time. I never expected to get on this well, looking back on it, the first few months were quite hard for me. Mark had a far easier time, as he obviously went straight into his job as he arrived and Macquarie Uni pretty much did everything for him in terms of organising our move and sorting out all his bits for him. The first day we caught the bus out to the uni (pre Epping-Chatswood rail link!) his office was waiting with his name on the door and all the staff took us out for coffee.

For me it was a lot harder - I didn't work at first but ended up just being left on my own a lot of the time, which is quite daunting in a big city like Sydney with a non-comprehensive public transport network. Especially since we were accommodated up in middle of nowhere North Ryde, great for Mark (next to uni) but terrible for me as it took an hour to get anywhere. Then I started temping but it was very sporadic and I didn't really have a routine or guaranteed income. Stuff got a bit better when we moved down to Meadowbank and I started working at HCF, and then even better still since we moved into the Inner West. I LOVE the Inner West. I honestly cannot think of a better place in the world to live. And now I have my new job that I love (mostly, obviously not when I'm still there at 6.30pm like today) and a good salary and an awesome apartment and a piano and a brand new SEWING MACHING (thanks, Mark!) and great coffee on my doorstep and great food on my doorstep and an amazing park on my doorstep (Sydney Park) and I live in a city where just a 15 minute train ride to Circular Quay and stepping onto the Manly ferry can make me feel like I am on holiday all year round.

The weather is beautiful at the moment. Cold, so cold but glorious in the sunshine. Even Bondi looked beautiful at the weekend (I love Bondi in winter sun. Shame about the trashiness of it in Summer). This week is due to be warmer. It certainly makes up for the month of rain that we just suffered through. I'm wondering how this winter will be. 2008 was so cold, record low Sydney temperatures and it didn't even start to warm up until October. 2009 had the cold snap in June but by August was a delight.

Anyway, thanks for reading 100 posts, people. Or 50 or 20 or 1 or however many you've persevered through. In honour of the 100th post, let's all say hello! Leave me a comment, tell me who you are, where you are, why you read!

I'll start. I'm Anna. I live in Sydney ....

Japan - a long weekend in Tokyo

Friday 2nd - Monday 5th April

Friday saw us back on the bullet train to Tokyo, where we arrived in the mid-afternoon. Read my Japanese fashion magazines on the train...well looked at the pictures, Japanese remains thus far incomprehensible, although we did start to recognise a few bits of lettering in Kyoto. Kyoto on the whole was much less well English-language-filled than Tokyo, although still enough English to find your way round.

We checked into our rather nice hotel back in Tokyo (Sunroute Plaza in Shinjuku), after navigating Shinjuku station yet again very unsuccessfully (Shinjuku station = nightmare). As the sun was due to start setting in an hour or so, we decided to walk a few blocks to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Offices - an imposing, Gotham City style office complex in West Shinjuku.



There is a viewing point at the top, which is free to go up to, so we went up and watched night fall and the lights of Tokyo start to twinkle.



Retired to Harajuku after descending to find dinner. After trying to find one restaurant from the guidebook and then another, and failing on both, we were despairing that we'd end up with sushi again! I love sushi but not for every single meal. We were hesitating on going into the kaitensushi we'd been in the week before when we noticed an italian place underneath it so took a desperate chance. Fortunately it ended up pretty good, and was obviously pretty popular, very busy.

One thing I definitely found in Japan which is very different to the UK and even to Australia is that it's much harder to find bad food. Everywhere we randomly went into was at least above average. They seem to have pretty high standards of food preparation and have many more laws about hygiene (and a generally much higher standard) than what I am used to. You can even eat raw prawns safely in Japan (and I did try but it was eww slimy!), something I would never do here or in the UK.
Consequently, I was amazed to find that for the first time in the history of me going on holiday and eating out a lot, I had absolutely none of my usual belly trouble. Not a single moment. All the food we ate seemed so much fresher and lighter than what we are used to!

The day of travelling and several beers made us sleep well and we woke up on Saturday morning ready for a trip to the Tokyo National Museum, which is a bit like the Louvre of Japan, and sits up on one side of Ueno Park.



It is spread across several buildings and this is the main building with the main exhibitions. It was fascinating, as everything was so different. There were just some amazing things in there like nothing you see in the European equivalent museums. We spent the whole day there in the end, looking at 1000 year old painted screens and jewellry and samurai armour. We also had a surprisingly good lunch in the cafe - delicious steaming ramen with tempura prawns. They didn't have anything vegetarian but plenty with fish. I think if you are proper vegetarian in Tokyo it would be very very hard. Kyoto is much easier as their traditional cuisine is veggie and you could really just live on inari-sushi all day mmmmmm.

We headed back to Shinjuku for dinner and ended up in the Mango Tree thai restaurant in the mall! It was tasty as though. Plus also that meal may have begun my current cuttlefish obsession....

Sunday saw us on our way to Harajuku as it was cos-play day, the day when all the teenagers dress up crazy! We got there quite late but still saw some crazy dressed people. Lots of girls in the babydoll type outfits - dyed blonde hair, everything pink and frilly and white and carrying loads of soft toys and dolls around with them.
We had a good look round the shops. I loved La Foret, which was like an amazing big building of boutiques, even Topshop was there. In the basement there were lots of crazy stalls, with all the cos-play clothes and the people who worked in there were dressed in the clothes! Pirates and everything! I bought a jacket in Topshop (ahhhh), and then pootled up the road where we spent ages in Japanese toy shop Kiddyland (SO MANY TOTOROS!!) before back to sushi for dinner. The sushi hiatus didn't last!

Monday was a wet wet wet day. A perfect museum day, except that Monday is closing day in Tokyo for all that type of thing. We were up super early and went to Tsukiji fishmarket, the biggest fish market in the world (i think)? It's an odd place to go as a tourist, but really quite fun. There were HUGE fish (whole fish, like, bigger than me!) being pulled around on trailers on the back of these little motor trolleys and price tags sitting on top of boxes of huge crabs that were trying to crawl out! It was fun.

We then took the long trip back round to Ginza, a business/shopping district, where we ate a quick pizza for lunch and decided to stay in the shops for the rest of the day, which was a bit blah at first as we'd done our shopping the day before. However, we found the Tokyo branch of French department store Printemps, which was bizarre and good and they made all the announcements in French on the store intercom oddly so I actually understood something, although I'm not sure the Japanese shoppers did! Printemps had a lovely little cafe inside, where we had a wonderful cup of coffee (the Japanese simply cannot do coffee. It's for the most part quite vile) with the ladies who lunch.

After caffeining up, we explored the Sony centre, which was a cross between a shop and a showroom of all their latest technology, which you could play with! The had some very impressive things in there. We watched the 3D tv for quite some time! They also had a home-cinema set up where we relaxed for a bit!



We also walked over supposedly the busiest crossing in the world, although it was quite quiet! Then we caught the train back to Harajuku and ate dinner in a pleasant pizza restaurant, before walking back to Shinjuku. When we got back, we were quite awake so decided to go have a look at night time Shinjuku, which is pretty much the image you get when you think of modern day Tokyo! It is crazy!



The main streets are awash with people and neon, games arcades, bars....the sidestreets filled with clubs and people waiting to meet other people, then as you head further in to the warren of streets the sleaze takes over and you are left with hostess bars, strip clubs and various unnamed venues, doorways hidden behind thick curtains...

After all that fun, we watched some amusing Japanese TV back at the hotel and got some sleep, ready for the last 3 days of our holiday.

Japan - Nara and a final day in Kyoto

Wednesday 31st March and Thursday 1st April 2010

Up early on Wednesday for a visit to Nara. After picking up a picnic lunch of sushi bento boxes from the Isetan foodhall, we jumped on the rapid train and 45 minutes later alighted at Nara station, which was apparently being renovated and was consequently a bit of a scaffolded mass of semi-constructed tunnels.

Nara was Japan's capital from 710 to 784 AD while the country was undergoing a very strong Buddhist influence. Consequently there are a LOT of buildings and things designated National Treasures and like Kyoto, a large area forms a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

We made our way up the main street, which was oddly dull. It was like a bad recreation of a 70s British High Street, with an inexplicable abundance of wedding dress shops. Fortunately, it wasn't long before we emerged at the other end into Nara Koen (Nara Park), and went in by the entrance leading straight to Kofuku-ji Temple and its impressive Five Story Pagoda. It's kind of unfortunate that from this day, very few of our photos came out very well as the light was very harsh and the sky very white.

Suddenly, we were surrounded by deer! Nara Koen is a deer park. There is a myth that a god came to Nara on a deer and so they are seen as envoys of a god and have protected status. They have gone wild all over the park though and today there are over 1000 of them.

We made our way through the crowds (people and deer) to Todai-ji Temple and followed the crowds through to the Daibutsu-den, the Great Buddha Hall, said to be the largest wooden structure in the world.



The Daibutsu-den houses the Daibutsu, Japan's largest bronze statue and one of the largest in the world, a 15 metre high Buddha on a throne. It was cast in the 8th century and almost bankrupted Japan as it used up most of the bronze supplies of the time. You can imagine it all you like but nothing prepares you for the scale of it as you walk through the door! You just don't get the same sense of it from the photos.



This one has a few people at the bottom to give you an idea. It was also really dark in the Daibutsu-den so the people are really over-exposed. The Buddha was looming in the dark. Mark didn't like the Daibutsu, he thought it wasn't good, just big, and big doesn't equal good. I liked it though.

We left the crowds at Todai-ji and headed deeper into the park, finding some beautiful secluded temple buildings on the hillside, where we stopped to eat our lunch in peace, looking out over Nara.



Had a lovely afternoon walking around yet more quiet bits of the path, regularly coming across beautiful little shrines and the occasional wandering deer.



Caught the train back as the sun began to set. The train went through some really pretty looking rural areas, which was lovely to see, as I was beginning to wander if all of Japan was just really industrial in its landscape! Had a great dinner back in Kyoto at Musashi in the city, a kaitensushi where all the dishes were 137 yen!! So cheap and so good!

After another cozy night on the futons, we woke on Thursday to a disappointing amount of rain falling outside our window. We headed down to the Imperial Palace under umbrellas to see if we could book on a tour inside, but the tour was unfortunately full. We headed back to Musashi, this time for lunch, to ponder a back up plan over more sushi, and decided to head down the road to Nijo-jo, a castle built as the Kyoto residence of a 17th century Shogun.

After being disappointed and dwelling on the fact we couldn't get into the Imperial Palace, we weren't expecting that much from Nijo-jo, but were actually really surprised by how good it was. You could go inside the castle (leaving shoes in the shoe racks at the door of course!) and walk around, and the inside was amazing. It was fascinating to see a building that was lived in, gives you a much different experience from the temples we had been to. It was all tatami mats and dark wood, gold and elaborately painted sliding doors. You weren't allowed to take photos inside, but it was quite good to be able to walk around in peace without flashes going off everywhere.



After the castle, we walked around the gardens a bit, it wasn't raining too much now and they were very pretty, with different sections done in different styles.



We headed out after a good look round and walked back into Kyoto to relax in Starbucks for a while and warm up. As it was our last night in Kyoto, we headed off to Sarasa, the cafe we went to on the second night and enjoyed so much, for beers, dinner and hot sake, then headed back for a moderately early night so as to be up for our 10.29am Shinkansen reservation the next day.

We both really came round to Kyoto in the end and were sad to leave. It's a great little city, more relaxed and easygoing than Tokyo, with what seemed like a great mix of scenery and outdoor stuff as well as great cafes and restaurants and culture.