Robert's Travels

We had a slow start to the morning after staying up late dancing the night away. We slept in until around 9:00, and were in no rush as we had breakfast and got ready for the day. We left the AirBnB shortly before 11:00, and spent what remained of the morning exploring the gay village in Sydney. This area, known as Darlinghurst, is where the majority of gay themed stores and bars are. The major road is named Oxford Street, and it reminded us a lot of Church Street in Toronto. We poked our heads in to a number of the businesses along Oxford Street, and at one store I picked up a cute rainbow tie to wear during Pride Month at work. We spent about an hour and a half exploring, then returned to the AirBnB for a quick lunch.

The weather wasn’t forecast to be fantastic, but it was warm and sunny on our walk, so we decided to make the trek out to Bondi Beach and see what it was like. We caught the 333 bus from a stop on Oxford Street that was just minutes from the AirBnB, and made it to the beach shortly before 14:00. Unfortunately the weather had turned while we were on the bus, and when we arrived the sun had mostly disappeared and the wind had picked up. We walked to the water’s edge, got our hands wet, then set our towels up on the sand a safe distance from the surf. We chose not to go for a swim, but I read a book while Todd rested on the beach. We spent about an hour on the sand before we decided the weather was going to turn to rain, as some very dark clouds were starting to roll in. We headed up to a stop at the far end of the beach that the 333 serviced, however we watched 2 buses drive past without stopping because they were completely full. After the second bus passed us by we began walking back to a stop that was just beside the Bondi pavilion and just barely fit onto a completely packed bus that took us back to Oxford Street.

On every trip we take we pick up a souvenir to remind us of the time we spent in the country. We had spent the past 14 days trying to decide what a good Australian souvenir would be, however we hadn’t had a lot of success. One of the businesses we had visited on our walk earlier in the day was a gay bookstore, and inside we ran across a coffee table book featuring nude photos of men taken in the Australian Outback. While we were at the beach we decided that this coffee table book would be a good souvenir, so we got off the bus a bit before the AirBnB, returned to the bookstore and purchased the book. We then walked back to the AirBnB.

We got back shortly before 17:00, and spent an hour relaxing. I watched the last few episodes of Love, Death and Robots on Netflix, while Todd watched some YouTube. We wanted a bit of downtime before we headed out to see Vivid again, and this was a good way to get a bit of relaxing in. We left for dinner shortly after 18:00 - we chose a well-reviewed Italian restaurant named Lucio Pizzeria that was a short walk from the AirBnB. We each ordered a pizza, and shared a calamari dish as a starter. One of the pizzas was an interesting combination - it had a white sauce base, sausage, thinly sliced potato, mozzarella, and rosemary. It was fantastic!

After dinner we walked from the restaurant to the Museum subway station, and took the first train to arrive to Circular Quay. It was a Sunday night, so we were a bit surprised when we saw how busy Vivid was. We walked from Circular Quay to the Opera House, where the exhibits set up in the Royal Botanical Gardens started. The Garden section was setup as a one-way walking path that wound through the gardens before exiting to Macquary Street, and along the pathway there were a number of different light-based exhibits. One of my favourites was a box that used four differently-coloured stage lights, some fog, and a number of mirrors to spell out a word - it was a really creative display. The walk took us about an hour to go through, after leaving the Gardens we walked back to the station where we spent about 10 minutes watching the video display projected onto the front of the Customs House. This video was a really neat ocean-themed animation.

We hopped onto the first train heading to Museum shortly before 21:00, and got back to the AirBnB around 21:30. We did some initial packing and headed to bed by 22:30, completely exhausted from the day.