mindstalk | Entries tagged with sydney

Old place was nice overall but had weird bits. Right on a busy stroad, that's not weird but it was unpleasantly loud. I did get used to it but still, meh. Weird was that the A/C was a mini-split mounted in the common area. If I closed my door, no A/C. It's not that hot at night and there was good third story air circulation with the kitchen windows so it didn't matter much, but still, weird. The host's room did have A/C... and hardly any personal touches (she left her door open when she went to work.)

New place was meant to be in Strathfield but I'm a station or 20 minute walk away, oh well. Place is okay. I do have A/C! mini, though a noisy and weak version. Building is right by train tracks but I can't hear them. I can hear the stroad further away. Sigh. Oh god, and I can see the stroad, so I have yet another north-facing room, too. North is toward the sun here.

There's an overpass over the tracks, so I could get to restaurants without traffic, and ate dinner at an Indian restaurant with poor service but good food. The nearest supermarket is an Aldi, across the stroad. I am fucking of stroads. Aldi is also weird. No hand baskets, trolleys need a coin deposit to unlock, the layout is... kind of like second-rate Costco more than regular supermarket. It's not huge payloads, but like vegetables transition smoothly into meat, it's like they just vaguely threw whatever they had together. Cheap though, ribeye for US$8/lb, mozzarella for hardly anything.

A Korean store nearby, Komart, was more conventional and had lettuce. The cashier seemed offended that I was buying only 3 things and asked to check the bag I had from Aldi.

I think my two bedrooms are about the same size but this one feels more spacious; the full bed is in the corner, so it's not wasting a foot of space between the bed and the wall, and there's just a tiny table instead of a big desk. Neither place provided kleenex. This one doesn't have paper towels in the kitchen, even though the hosts live here and cook a lot.

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/545776.html

I recall what I forgot last night. I've been living for 21 weeks in "drive on the left" countries, and I'm still not used to it, especially for turning cars.

The T4 line seems genuinely inconsistent about having stop announcements, or at least ones loud enough to be intelligible.

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/545391.html

Huh, been a while.

Oct 22: went to Darling Harbour, and Hyde Park. Meh.

Oct 24: dim sum (carts) at Marigold. Good, but pricier than I'm used to in Boston, $AUD 42 for 5 plates. I guess not that much more expensive after the exchane rate. I also went to the Chinese Garden of Friendship, which was pretty neat. Cheap ($6), a good size, with multiple places and views, and forking paths, so it can keep you busy figuring it out. There was a lone Australian raven perching on a pot, making weird sounds, which apparently is their thing.

Oct 25: Found a dim sum shop (point and go) near where I live, six pieces for $11. I've been going repeatedly since.

Oct 27: Took the light rail west of Central. It was okay, no great views. Found a Glebe Art Show near one station, which was pretty neat. Also took the train out to Liverpool, to make use of the Sunday fare cap.

Oct 28: This was a good day! I finally went to the beach again, for Sculpture By the Sea, an even where like a hundred sculptures are put up along the walk from Bondi Beach to Tamarama Beach. The sculptures themselves aren't life changing but the walk itself is really nice. There were rock weather effects I'd never seen before.

Oct 29: walked down to the Centennial Parklands, which I'd seen described as a good place for birding, also they're huge. This was mostly a bust; the parks are largely grass, plus some not very interesting trees, and the occasional pond. There were some highlight, like seeing various black swans, and later finding giant bat colony in a eucalyptus grove. Giant colony or giant bats? Yes, both. And surprisingly active at 2:20 solar time. A flying large fruit bat looks a bit like baby Drogon as it soars overhead with slow flapping.

But otherwise the park was largely "there's a lot of grass and I'm lost." Things were actually nice outside the park, on Wallis and Ocean streets, lot nicer tree cover there. Some attractive neighborhoods as I walked north up Hargrave, reminding me of Georgetown in DC, ornate narrow homes. (Really narrow, like 3 meters.) And then I found Trumper Park, which had all the interest Centennial didn't, like topography and plants that weren't grass or eucalyptus. At one point it was a lot like being in a little jungle with a pond at the foot of a cliff. Way cooler.

Other observations:

Buses and trains don't have ads, but some of the train stations have not just billboard ads but electronic displays with *sound*. Oh Sydney No. Boston's MBTA has been growing in display ads but at least they were silent when I left.

Brisbane seemed better at CBD parks, though there's still one here I haven't been to.

Sydney has much better transit, somewhat shorter traffic lights, and more neighborhoods that look fun and pedestrian.

I was blowing my nose a lot, which made me worry about allergies -- it's spring, after all! I couldn't find pollen details. Then I wasn't blowing my nose. *shrug*

Staying another week, moving to the west.

Had lunch for $7, so like $5 US. $5 for a box of Thai food, then $2 for a tempura shrimp roll.

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/544914.html

One thing I don't think I mentioned: when I flew from Brisbane to Sydney, the jetway on this domestic gate serving domestic flights said "Welcome to Brisbane" in English and Japanese. And very distinctively Japanese, all kana, no overlap with Chinese. Interesting.

Today I confirmed the Sunday fare cap, doing lots of train travel for the sum of $2.80. First some kaitenzushi nearby, tempting because they put out lots of grilled salmon, though at AUD$3.80 a plate it's way more expensive than the 100-200 yen plates of Sushiro in Osaka. Then the T4 to Town Hall station, and I noticed that this train doesn't announce stops either, like the terrible buses! WTF. Well, there was no sign, and I think there was no voiceover, though I'm not certain now.

Walked around Town Hall a bit, popped into St. Andrew's Cathedral which was decently impressive, then got caught up trying to get to a Japanese bookstore. Found myself in the Galleries, which might be underground shopping tunnels, but led up into a mall, with Muji, a store of Japanese goods, many with Japanese labels on them. I finally got up to Kinokumiya Books, which is a brand I think I've seen before. It's actually a full-service bookstore, and huuuuge -- one floor, but it just kept going. But they do have translated manga right up front, including a rather more-than-racy volume of How To Train Your Devil out on a sample table. Though I didn't find any *other* raunch manga. Yes I looked.

Rather large section of translated light novels. Well, not that big, but big compared to how many light novels I knew had official translations.

Waaay at the other end of the store they carry actual Japanese manga and books, plus "learning Japanese materials". I find it hilarious that the Japanese manga are in sealed plastic as in Japan, to prevent free browsing, but the English manga are not. A couple of Japanese volumes were around AUD$11 vs a 440 yen cover price, so fair bit of markup. I forgot to look at the English prices.

I walked toward the next stop, Central, and found Chinatown by accident. There was a building of "the Chinese Nationalist Party of Australasia", with KMT up on top. I haven't looked up what that's about yet. What's the KMT doing in Australia?

Didn't pass any really obvious dim sum places, whether bakery or cart.

Then got on the T1, which definitely did have signs and voiceover, and ended up riding out west quite a way. Not to the end, that seemed really long, though maybe not as much as I thought. Got off at Doonside, not much there -- some shops, some extent of one story buildings. I was traveling to see things (surface rail!) and also wondering if I can find places to go stargazing without making a huge trip or going camping (i.e. subway or ferry and *back*.) I definitely found some candidates, though I have no idea what the city glow would be.

Headed back, got off at Strathfield, got reminded of Osaka. Shops and malls and multi-story buildings around a train station, as it should be! Also a plaza. I found a food court with a Japanese style bakery, meaning a wide variety of products and you use tongs to put some on a tray, and I got a curry donut, which I never did in Japan because I couldn't tell what anything was.

From watching others I discovered that the T1 also has reversible seats. You just grab a handle on top and the back leans the other way and now you can sit forward instead of backward, or face your friends. It's great!

A tree was full of birds who collectively sounded like a mass of cicadas, only louder. Don't know what they were. From the silhouettes I would have guessed parakeets but the one bird I could see looked more like a magpie or the other black-and-white bird around here.

T9 back to Central. Also had the stops and seats of the T1. Explored east. Not very exciting.

T4 back, no visual sign, possibly audio announcements I stopped paying attention, and no reversible seats. So older models, I guess. All the trains have the three level design though, where most of the seats are above or below the boarding level but there are some disability-friendly seats at boarding level.

I've been feeling cramped by my phone battery not lasting as long, and my external battery no longer recharging it well. I at least diagnosed the latter problem: a bad cable. When I switched to the cable I use with my laptop, the batter charged the phone quite quickly without any fiddling.

I really wish I had more USB ports on this laptop. I basically have one socket adapter, and 3 things to charge or run right now -- phone, battery, and a tiny cheap USB fan I bought to help stay cool.

Public toilets seem a lot harder to find in Sydney than in Brisbane, and are stinkier when found. Well, lots of the train stations have toilets, which may be more than Brisbane had, but still stinkier.

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/544251.html

I said that Brisbane reminded me of LA. But many of the buildings reminded me of New Orleans, with really ornate porches and balcony railings. That holds true in Sydney too.

Took the train to King's Cross yesterday, walked around, saw more of that type of building, walked down to the coast but it was occupied by a military base, feh. Bondi Junction where I'm staying seems to mostly close at 9 PM like Brisbane, but King's Cross stays open later. On research, apparently it's a red light district that got hit by lockout laws forcing bars to close at 1:30 AM or 3 AM, rather than even later, with businesses complaining about how that would kill them. Granted bars in Brisbane did stay open past 9, but their kitchens (in my limited sample) did not.

Today I took the 380 bus to the end of its line. Sydney buses don't tell you the next stop either. People were slow getting off, waiting for the bus to stop before getting up. Lots of surfboards, this is beach country. Australians often call "Thank you" to the driver even when getting off at the back.

End of the line is Watson's Bay, also Robertson Park, Military Road. There were quaint looking beach-style businesses, and a general store complete with old-timey typeface. I had some fish and chips, meh. (Are they ever not meh?) There's another military base up one ridge. I walked around, saw some rocky beaches, headed vaguely home walking up a road until a bus caught up.

Staring out into the Pacific had some mental effect. You're just gazing out into the distance and there's nothing but water. No ships in that direction either, far from the harbor. You're gazing toward the north island of New Zealand but it's too far to see any sign of, except maybe clouds and i doubt that. I'm a 23 minutes walk from the beach (though not that part), which I think is as close as I've ever been. SF had me 3 miles from the ocean, I worked in walking distance of SF Bay and Boston Harbor but those are bay and harbor, Mallaig was pretty close to the coast but again harbory, NYC Chinatown might have been a mile but again that's Hudson River more than Atlantic. But here a modest walk will take me to endless ocean.

As for the bus, then I realized that it was getting dark and I was near the coast. Can I has stars? I can has stars! Slipped into Gap Park, where a bunch of trees screened me from streetlights, and obviously there are no lights to the east across the ocean. It certainly wasn't desert-dark but wasn't bad for being in a metropolis. I saw Scorpio pretty well, Alpha Centauri and its neighbor Hadar, two stars of the Southern Cross, and a very definite satellite. Then a bright fast object that I wasn't sure if it was a satellite but it didn't look like a plane -- no blinking, heading to nowhere (SE, probably south of NZ.) Possibly a shooting star or two but if so they were very brief.

I took what Google claimed was the last 380 bus back, at 20:44, but the driver, Transit app, and Moovit all disagree. Even Google itself is confusing: stops further had buses listed until midnight, and an outbound bus had stops all the way out, but those stops themselves still showed no buses. Weird. I noticed the bus has a TV screen switching between camera shots of the bus interior and exterior. So they have the display, now if they only piped in something useful, like the next stop...

Once home, I tried identifying satellites. Ka-ching! https://in-the-sky.org/satpasses.php?town=2147714 for 19 Oct 2019 shows CZ-2C R/B matching the first satellite in path and time, and ISS for the second one. Though it felt faster.

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/543789.html

Flew in yesterday. Qantas seats were small, 30 inch pitch 17 wide. Tiger and Jetstar supposedly wider at 18, but even more packed at 29 pitch. We got a free meal on a 1.5 hour flight, a half-pastrami sandwich for me and 140 grams of chicken pie (heated) for the guy next to me.

I quickly got an idea why Sydney has higher transit mode share than Brisbane: trains out were 7-8 minutes, 15 after 10 PM, vs. "every 30 minutes and sometimes 15". Central Station has 25 platforms. Base fare is $2.24 on bus, $3.61 train, longer with distance, but there's a daily cap of $16.10, or $50 for a Monday-Sunday 7 day period. Not counting airport fares ($19). $2.80 cap on Sunday, the website says, which is less than a single train fare!

Timetable says my local train runs every 10 minutes to midnight, slowing down a bit to 1:16 AM. Google disagreed.

333 bus runs every 3 minutes, or a bit less, to 11 PM. Other buses seem more like 30 minutes buses.

Intersections are still annoying, I timed 80 seconds to cross with the light. Which is better than Brisbane...

Sydney is on DST, so I have to remember that solar zenith is around 1PM now. Also webcomic update time is now 3PM or later...