yani on tour - day four

Today's theme is Deco... our hotel was in the middle of all these Art Deco buildings (actually I think our hotel WAS an Art Deco building, although not an overly pretty one given all the competition)... and seeing all these places just confirmed that my favourite style of architecture is definitely Art Deco... all the buildings seem to have names, and there's all these rounded corners and interesting brickwork... yummy!

Interestingly, if the arch window in the bottom left corner is a very Art Deco thing, then my love of all things Deco has existed since I was a kid... my favourite window in Play School when I was little was ALWAYS the arch window...

And so... Yani on Tour - The Final Day!

It's my birfday!

An interesting aside, the fact that it WAS my birthday also led to a new codeword for the identification of a cute guy as he approached or went past... "birthday"... because the Universe must have known it was my birthday AND my last day in Sydney and kept sending all the pretties my way.

I got up fairly early again (I actually don't think there's been a day when I haven't been up around or before 6am), had a shower, finished off the last of my packing and then cleared out everything from my room and dragged it all up the corridor to Ma's room before we went off for breakfast.

We followed Macleay Street down and around the hill towards Wooloomooloo Bay (lord I'd hate to live there, there's too many oo's in the address name), taking photos of all the Art Deco houses on the way and anything else that seemed slightly interesting. I'm not sure ALL the houses were strictly Art Deco, but whatever they were, I really like it.

After some umming and aahhing we had breakfast in some random hole in the wall cafe right opposite the hotel on the wharf... which wasn't bad considering... and they did stock Chocolate, Honey and Malt milk which I haven't had in FOREVER! I'm not even sure they stock in SA anymore... must remember to look...

Then we came back up the hill and up and down all the little side roads off Macleay Street, finding more Deco buildings and giving my now recharged camera battery something of a workout (and I discovered that my new 2 GB memory card in my camera will hold something like 1200 photos). We ended up going past the hotel in search of somewhere we could stop and have something to drink... and while there were probably a ton of places we could have stopped, nothing seemed quite like the right kind of place, so we ended up going further and further down the road until we stopped at some random little French place (again with the Frenchness... there was a whole bunch of Frenchness happening on this trip, I tell ya) and we were basically halfway down Victoria Street, and nearly at the Green Park Hotel where I'd had drinks with the boys on Wednesday night.

Then we wandered back to the hotel and did much sitting around until it was check out time (okay, it was less than half an hour, but still). Then we went down and checked out (*sob sob sob*) which was fairly easy since we'd prepaid for the rooms and all we needed to do was hand in our keys and get them to shove our luggage in the back room until the shuttle bus came to pick us up. Technically we should probably have had a later start to the morning, checked out and THEN gone for a late breakfast and a wander... but we didn't, so we had time to kill (although only about an hour or so), so we ended up doing more wandering around the general Potts Point area, and instead of going south or west like we had been doing, we went east a bit and ended up down by Elizabeth Bay. And again with the Art Deco. I am SO all about the Art Deco after this trip!

After we wandered back up towards the hotel I made what was possibly the most important discovery of the trip... I found Farmers Union Iced Coffee in Sydney! Yes, I found it... in the Woolworths directly across from the hotel of all places! And it was worse because we went in there on the first afternoon, but I never went as far as the fridge section, so I never saw it until our last day. Granted they only had the regular version and the light version (I would have sacrificed a small animal of some sort for some of the strong version), but they did have the big two litre bottles... and if they had it in one Woolworths, odds are good other ones around the city might (or at least could order it in from the Potts Point store... which is semi important given the conversation I had with Tom and Andrew at drinks on Wednesday night).

We sat in the sunshine at a bus stop next to the hotel and drank our Iced Coffees... then went and loitered around in the lobby for fifteen or so minutes until the shuttle bus rocked up (and it was actually early, if you can imagine such a thing... AND we were the second to last pick-up stop, so we didn't have to endure all the trauma of being driven somewhat recklessly around the city again)... and then instead of the alleged 45 minutes it was supposed to take to get to the airport, the driver took whatever the appropriate freeway was and we were at the airport in around twenty minutes.

Of course that meant that Boarding Pass, God of Airline Travel, had to take his revenge and the plane that was supposed to leave at 1:50 was delayed until the fairly exacting time of 2:22pm.

But I had my free Birthday Boost Juice to get (mmmm King William Chocolate) and ended up buying a small yet funky Caterpillar backpack (which is somewhat ironic since Ma used to work for Caterpillar in Adelaide when she first moved here, and I think that's where she actually met the Paternal Creature... so if it wasn't for Caterpillar, I might not be here... scary thought)... sure, I was probably overcharged for it, since I did buy it in the airport, but it was a cute little bag.

Luckily there weren't any further delays to the flight and we were soon up, up and away...

I did discover something interesting... when we went to Melbourne last time, and when we were on the flight to Sydney I sat in the middle seat and let Ma have the window seat... and on every one of those flights I had varying degrees of nausea... but on our return flight I got the window seat... and there wasn't the vaguest bit of nausea to be seen... even though we had a little bit of turbulence while flying over Victoria... so from now on it's the window seat for me! Weird really... and I can't explain it...

When we finally made it back to Adelaide, after some slight dicking around (Ma had lost the tag off her luggage, and it was the nice red thong one we got from Kathmandu, so we had to ask at the baggage counter and the hissy old queen in front of us took forever) we grabbed a cab back to my place, and while I'm a past master at the whole silent cab ride thing, Ma always ends up being Chatty Cathy, but the driver wasn't too bad, so it wasn't overly painful. I did surprise myself... he wanted to know if we had a specific route we wanted to take from the airport to my place, and Ma started to pipe up with something, and suddenly I opened my mouth and the whole journey, complete with road names and everything just spilled out... now I'm not somebody who navigates by street names... I do everything by landmarks, so I kinda scared myself as it all came tumbling out...

Then finally it was Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity Jigg...

My house wasn't actually all that bad... even though it had been sitting in the heat for four days with no fans or anything, it also hadn't had anybody in it, or any electronic devices on, so it was reasonably cool overall.

I unpacked my suitcase, piled up all my haul of meemaws, doohickeys and widgets and surveyed what I'd bought during the trip...

In addition to the stuff from The Bookshop, I had the aforementioned Aral Backpack from Caterpillar, a bookmark and a couple of keyrings from the Opera House (the red one was actually free because we spent a certain amount), five different bookmarks from the Visitors Centre in The Rocks and a magnetic bookmark from the Chinese Gardens... so basically, the trip was very much about The Bookmark... well I do have something of a collection, and I do use an awful lot of them.

Once I'd sorted out my junk, Ma gave me my birthday presents (which she'd brought down on Tuesday morning and left here), which was somewhat anticlimactic after everything else we'd done during the day... which consisted of the latest Harry Potter movie, North by Northwest, some Mythbusters episodes we picked up cheap and a few books. But then, the trip was partially a birthday present too...

Then we hooked up my digital camera, and then Ma's, to the teevee with the cord I discovered the week before we left and went through all of our photos... it was kind of cool, but also kind of freaky to get to display them on the big, big screen like that...

And since neither of us had the supplies or the wherewithal to be bothered making anything food related we went out to dinner on O'Connell Street and shared a plate of salt and pepper squid... then I sent Ma home and kind of spent the rest of the evening noodling around on the internet, catching up with various bit and pieces...

Thus endeth the Holiday...

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