Sydney
weekend walks: northbridge park
This weekend walk would have to be the most uneventful and “boring” walk we have done in Sydney. It sounds horrible for us to say it but it was! There was lovely scenery in parts but only for the first half – the rest of the walk was very much just trying to beat the storm clouds back to the car, hiking through suburbia.
To be fair, we were not really in the state of mind to be walking but we needed to stay motivated to remember that this is contributing to our “training” for the Camino (as a side note, would like to say that we have less than halfway to go on our fundraising target – YAY! Thank you to everyone who has donated).
Anyway, hope you enjoy some of our photos as we walked from Cammeray Bridge through Northbridge Park along Long Bay up around to Sailors Bay before returning to the car at Cammeray Bridge.
Have a great week!
Next time we post, we will be in Brazil!
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weekend walks: 3 museums of sydney
We went for a completely different type of walk this weekend – we visited three museums in Sydney that we hadn’t been to in a while.
Stop 1 – Sydney Jewish Museum
On the first Sunday of every month, entrance is free! So we were lucky to be there on June 1 🙂 There was an Anne Frank exhibit on, which reminded us of our time in Amsterdam visiting Anne Frank’s House. Walking through the museum is simply so moving, such a harsh reminder of the atrocities of the Holocaust and how war is good for no one.
Stop 2 – Art Gallery NSW
Entrance is always free except if you want to see the special exhibits and it is quite easy to lose a few hours wondering around in there. Our favourite rooms are the European art rooms on the main entrance level, makes us excited to be returning to Europe in July to explore the art galleries there once more 🙂
Stop 3 – Government House via Royal Botanical Gardens
It is one of the living museums of Sydney and a guided tour of the inside is available on Fridays through Sundays. The entrance is free and the tour guides are volunteers who share so much interesting information. We learnt about Government House and facts of the history of Sydney that we hadn’t (or don’t recall) learning at school!
It was a side of Sydney that we figured is listed in “Travel Guides” that we ourselves haven’t truly seen. So we played “tourists” in our own city. We were not disappointed!
To add to the distance we walked, we stumbled across the Wishing Tree in the Botanical Gardens. We made our wish and being superstitious we completed the ritual, getting ourselves dizzy circling the tree 🙂
Hope our wish comes true.
Have a fabulous week, folks!
It’s our last full week of work for a while …
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a culinary trip to afghanistan
We figured that we would not be able to try the cuisine in Afghanistan anytime soon, so we went for the next best thing: we ate at an Afghan Restaurant in Sydney. And the food is simply scrumptious.
The flavours are influenced by countries close by, probably most notably India and there are elements of China, possibly due to connections via the Silk Road back in the day.
To start we ordered our drinks, one cherry lassi and one salted lassi. The salted lassi (also referred to as Doogh) is a savoury yoghurt drink with cucumber and mint tossed through it. It definitely has a unique yet refreshing taste and is less heavier than the typical mango lassi. The cherry lassi was sweet and tasted almost like a cherry juice but creamier.
For entree, we ordered a mixed platter for two (it could easily have fed 4 people) – it included 2 meat and 2 vegetarian options.
(1) Afghani potato flat bread with chopped onion shallots, coriander and spices, served with yoghurt sauce
(2) Vegetarian dumplings topped with a bolognese sauce – it felt almost like a Chinese dish fused with an Italian dish. There is an option that is a purely vegetarian (i.e. no bolognese sauce)
(3) Beef dumplings also served with a bolognese sauce.
(4) Seekh kabab – lamb mince charcoal grilled, served with a spicy chutney.
For our main, we shared a chicken dish, Chicken Karahi, which was ever so fragrant with spices, cooked in a tomato-base sauce with onion and capsicum. The sauce had some “kick” & we were glad to have ordered the lassi 🙂 With every mouthful, the chicken was so moist, tender and full of flavour.
Accompanying the chicken dish was naan bread. We ordered orange pallow rice as an addition. The rice had an orange flavour and the cardamom through it was very pronounced.
The waiter (who we suspect is also the owner) is a very friendly man and is always obliging when we have eaten here. He will always advise if he thinks we have ordered too much or can recommend dishes worth trying, especially during your first visit.
We are by no means food critics nor are we turning into foodies but considering our blog is about our travels, this particular trip was a culinary one for our taste buds! We were pretty sure our attempts to avoid gluten, failed here as well as our attempts to cut back on meat…
Bamiyan Restaurant is located in Five Dock, about 10 km from Sydney centre. We would recommend anyone in Sydney or visiting Sydney should consider giving it a go 🙂
Disclaimer: This is our post and we were not sponsored for it.
Have you tried Afghan cuisine before? What did you think?
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weekend walks: lake parramatta reserve
After what seemed like an extraordinarily long week, the weekend was finally here. This week’s walk was just a relatively short one compared to last week.
Lake Parramatta is about 20 minutes west of Sydney. The Lake Circuit is about 4½ km and took us about 2 hours – there were two easier, shorter walks but we opted for this one to break in our new hiking boots 🙂 It wasn’t a hard walk, it was just that we wandered off track occasionally for photo opportunities or just for the mere exploration factor.
We were graced with the presence of plenty of birds, insects and reptiles, fortunately none of the reptiles were snakes. And we saw mushrooms – lots and lots of mushrooms: from brown ones to yellow ones to bright fluoro orange ones.
This was the first of our weekend walks where we had to cross creeks or streams – really putting the new shoes to the test!
Although immersed in nature on this walk, the sounds of humankind is not far off. Competing with the trees rustling and birds squawking are the loud rumbles of planes overhead or the engines of cars passing on the main road nearby. Sadly, the sound of nature does get drowned out often. There is a spell of silence about half way in the walk where the tracks goes a little further from the main roads which made the walk much more pleasant!
Despite our ears not really feeling like we had escaped the city, our eyes were fortunate enough to enjoy the view of our surrounds.
Wishing everyone a happy Sunday!
Hope you have a great week ahead 🙂
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