Walking Sydney

After the red-eye flight and a lot of walking on Sunday, Monday morning I slept in and got a slow start to my day. I had a nice breakfast at the sandwich shop on the ground floor of the hostel and now that I had gotten my bearings I planned out my activities for the week. For that day I decided to walk north and tour the central business district and Hyde Park to the east. The shops nearest to where I am staying are a bit dodgy, but as I walked north they steadily improved until I reached the main shopping area where there was plenty of stores. The highlight was the Queen Victoria Building, a block long building built in the 1880s as a market that has been restored and now is an upscale mall. It is a beautiful building and great to walk through. There were American stores such as Border's, international design stores, and Aussie stores. I did a little window shopping as I made my way east until I arrived in the New South Wales government area.

There I found the Sydney Barracks Museum, a building built in 1819 as a barracks for arriving prisoners to the prison colony. The building later became a female immigration building during the arrival of the Irish during the famine, a mental institution, and finally a court building in the late 1800's. It remained in service until the 1970's when it was converted into a museum. The Barracks was one of many buildings commissioned by Governor Macquarie to improve Sydney, but London did not feel their prison colony needed to be beautiful so Macquarie had to commission many public works on the sly and hired a former convict Francis Greenway to design most of the parks and buildings. The Museum has a lot of interesting artifacts from the prison colony era, including part of the building set up with hammocks as it looked when it was a barracks. There was a school tour group in the courtyard and they had an interactive program going on where a guide was leading them in activities like laying brick just like the prisoners.

A short walk from the barracks museum I entered St. Mary's Cathedral, which large signs promoted as the home for World Youth Day in 2008, including a visit by the Pope. I walked in during daily mass and had a seat and stayed until the end. It is a nice sized Cathedral, but not any bigger than the one I used to attend in Richmond, although it is a little more ornate. After mass, I walked around the church looking at the stained glass windows. I exited out into Hyde Park, a public park set aside by Macquarie. The large Archiblad fountain is on one end and on the southern end is the Anzac Memorial. Built in the 1930's to honour the soldiers killed in the First World War, it is very art deco. Looking at the pictures from its commemoration, it dominated the surrounding area when it was built. Today, large high rises now surround the park and diminish the grandeur a bit, but it is still an important landmark in Sydney. I walked up the stairs and then down to the display area below where they had a few displays and artifacts from the Great War.

Leaving Hyde Park, I walked back to the shopping district and had a mid-afternoon snack. I found a bookstore and spent some time wandering about. There are little things that I miss being in Palau and bookstores are one of them so it has been nice being able to spend a little time in bookstores. The previous day's activities and odd sleep schedule had left me worn out, so I returned to the hostel where I spent time writing and editing the pictures now available on my picasa site. I then went over to China town and found an internet connection to surf the web and upload the pictures. After I was done, I walked over to the nearby Market City mall and caught an early evening showing of Spider-man 3. I enjoyed Pirates 3 more, but it was still a nice escape and I am happy I got a chance to see it. Afterwards I returned to China town for more internet time and even got a chance to do a video chat with my mother back home, something the slow dial-up internet of Palau will not allow. My battery was running low and the evening was getting late, so I returned back to the hostel for some much needed sleep.

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