Weekend update

Matthew and I had a nice weekend. On Friday night, we went to Bloodwood, a wine bar/restaurant in our neighborhood. They were really busy, so we gave them our mobile number and then wandered down King Street, browsing the shop windows. We stopped for a drink at a cute café/bar called BuzzBar, where Matthew had a ruby Manhattan (a ruby uses port instead of sweet vermouth) and I had a glass of rosé, and then the restaurant called to say our table was ready!

Dinner was delicious. They serve small plates, so the waiter suggested about 3 dishes for 2 people. So we had chicken wings, the charcuterie plate, and garlic prawns. Everything was so good, especially the sauce on the prawns - I don’t know what all was in it, but it was quite good.

On Saturday, we went to the University of Sydney (aka Sydney Uni) to check out their gym. It’s close to our apartment, and the public can join, so we went to take a look. It was fine – not amazing, but certainly not bad - a pretty standard gym, plus the people at the front desk were really friendly, and the membership rates aren’t too bad.

Afterwards we walked to the Broadway Shopping Centre to pick up a few more things for the apartment, and got some lunch to go (take away), which we took to Victoria Park and had a nice picnic. We saw the Victoria Park Pool, which is run by the City of Sydney and looked very nice.

Saturday night, we went to our new friend Rob’s birthday dinner at Izote Mexican Restaurant. The Mexican food was actually pretty good. It’s expensive - it’s more "cuisine" here - so I don’t think we’ll find good, cheap Mexican food like we were used to, but oh well. The company at dinner was great; everyone was really friendly. And man, can they drink! Our table went through something like 8 bottles of wine.

Oh that’s another thing to get used to here – a lot of restaurants have BYO licenses, where you can bring your own wine to dinner. Some places it's free, others charge a small corkage fee, but it's usually less than $5 per person. The very fancy restaurants don't usually allow BYO, but a lot of places do, so that's nice. But, we're not in the habit yet of bringing wine whenever we go out, so we were the only people at dinner that didn't bring wine – oops!

After dinner, we went with our friends Jennifer and Mark to go see a rock show at the Annandale Hotel, apparently an institution in the local music scene. We saw an Aussie band called The Mess Hall, and tickets were $25 each! Anyway, the show was okay - a 2-piece band with guitar and drums - pretty rocky, some songs were pretty good, others just okay, but it was fun to see our first show in Australia. Also, thankfully bars here are smoke-free, as in Portland!

This morning (Sunday) we had breakfast at the Deus Café, which is a very interesting place. Deus Ex Machina is a place that takes old motorcycles and bicycles and fixes them up to resell them. They also sell clothing and have a café next door, which isn’t just coffee and pastries, it’s a full-on menu, and the food was really good. I had crepes with lemon custard and strawberries and a side of bacon, and M had poached eggs and toast with a side of salmon.

Another thing to get used to is that some restaurants increase their prices on the weekends by about 10%. Sometimes that’s only a few dollars more, which isn’t a huge deal, but it’s just odd to us, since that we don’t have that surcharge in the States. Also, bacon here is a little different. It seems it's just cured, not smoked. Also there are two different cuts, sometimes it's long strips like in the U.S., which has one name (rasher) and sometimes it's oval-shaped, which has another name (short cut bacon?).

This afternoon we went to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which had a free showing of Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 movie "Blow Up." Then we came back to Newtown (our neighborhood) and had dinner at a place called Moo Gourmet Burgers. Our burgers were really good, definitely the best we’ve had so far in Oz. Oh, and generally burgers here are served with lettuce, tomato and a slice of beetroot. Oddly, the beet just comes standard on burgers, no idea why.