sydney city tour

If you've been following my entries on Sunshine23's Sydney travel adventures, you may be asking: How can Sunshine23's Sydney travel itinerary not include a tour around Sydney City? Actually, I have saved this entry for last because there were too many photos to sort through for the city tour.

I brought Sunshine23 on City tours on two separate days. The first trip to the City, I started off by showing her Chinatown. While walking to Chinatown, I thought I definitely had to show her the CB Hotel. There was also this very popular real estate agency called LJ Hooker on the same street. We who understand the Hokkien derivatives of these names will never name our establishments as such.



Below you'll see the traditional gate through to the main stretch of Chinatown. I can read the chinese characters but will have to admit I don't know the meaning of the phrase.



I bought the piping hot custard puffs freshly made on the spot from Emperor's Garden Bakery for Sunshine23 to try. They are really good. But hey, the prices have gone up! They used to be only 20cents each.





We had some Szechuan cold chilli noodles and spicy shredded beancurd at Shancheng Hot Pot Restaurant along Sussex Street before taking a slow walk towards Darling Harbour.



Sunshine23 was quite intrigued by the trees with camouflage prints so I hugged one for her.



Our surprise encounter with a reptile at Darling Harbour.



We stopped for some chocolate heaven at Lindt Cafe at Cockle Bay Wharf. I told Sunshine23 that I'd let her try Lindt, Max Brenner and Guylian cafes and let her decide which has the best chocolate drink. We did some of Sunshine23's infamous toothless old women stints with Lindt chocolate while there. That concluded our first trip to the city as we had to rush home to prepare the much anticipated X'mas Eve feast then.



We did our second city tour on a bright and sunny day (and got quite sunburnt afterwards!). This time we walked towards Town Hall and I introduced Sunshine23 to the Queen Victoria Building.





Next I showed her my favourite building in that vicinity - the Strand Arcade. I happened to be there one night when all the shops have closed and it was absolutely beautiful. It's definitely not as pretty in the day when it's cluttered by human, cafe seatings and noise, a lot of noise. I told myself I must go back again one evening when the shops close to take some photos.



As we continued walking along the main George Street, we reached No. 1 Martin Place, where the General Post Office building is located - another historical building.



I really love the red carpet with black and white tiles.



We spent quite a considerable time inside the GPO, mostly taking photos on this beautiful stairway. Funny how I've always walked past this building without any thoughts of having a look inside. I would have completely missed out on its beauty had I not acted the tour guide for Sunshine23.





This was still at the GPO, on the outside.



We then arrived at The Rocks. A nurse helped take a photo of the two of us at the entrance to Nurses Walk. We had a lot of fun exploring the little lanes at The Rocks.



Only Sunshine23 will be able to appreciate why I was 'skipping' along at The Rocks as can be seen from the second pic below. Hehe.



Love the galleries and cafes there!



It was so hot on that day that we needed something cold to soothe our burning throats, hence the lemon sorbet. Man, it was so sour, I couldn't do more than just one mouthful of it.



One of the objectives of the city tour was to show Sunshine23 some of the weekend markets we have in Sydney. I had planned to bring her to The Rocks Market, Paddington Market and maybe Rozelle Market without realising that the one at The Rocks only open on Sundays and the one at Paddington only opens on Saturdays. So we only managed to do a quick tour of the market at The Rocks before moving on to do some touristy shots with Sydney's famous Harbour Bridge and Opera House.





In the second pic below, Sunshine23 stuck out her tongue to boo at the boats that kept going past, hence interrupting our attempts to capture a nice touristy shot with the Opera House.



I forgot whose grand idea it was to try to eat the Opera House, but it must have been triggered by my passing remark that it looks like slices of watermelon from afar.



We attempted more than three or four times to take a selfshot of the both of us eating the 'watermelon slices' at the same time. We must have appeared like lunatics to the people around us. Notice there are irrelevant human beings in the pic?



To prevent 'eating' these innocent humans by mistake, we decided to pick them up and drop them elsewhere outside of the picture frame.



Once we got tired of eating the Opera House, we went into the Royal Botanic Gardens to take a breather.





With the energy levels recharged, we continued with more walking, this time all the way to Woolloomooloo for the famous Harry's hotdogs. Don't I look like the ambassador for Woolloomooloo here? And omg, we had a tough time saying the word Woolloomooloo continuously for five times. Try it and tell me how you go.



And here's Harry's Cafe de Wheels. They really have the best hotdogs in Sydney, I reckon. Even the real Colonel Sanders was here (not this day, but many years ago) for the hotdogs.



I have not included pictures of the tiger pies here cos they don't do the actual pie justice, they literally looked like shit on photos, but they're really good too.





Our legs were about to break from all the walking, we'd done about five hours of walking by then. But the day wasn't over. Being in the midst of summer, the day doesn't end til about 8.30pm... so we continued our explorations in Paddington. We decided to take a taxi there from Woolloomooloo instead so we could conserve some energy for walking the alleys in Paddington. Ended up enjoying a sinful cup of thick italian dark chocolate drink at Max Brenner instead courtesy of Alice who is Sunshine23's friend's colleague.





The verdict was that the chocolate drink at Max Brenner tastes way way way better than Lindt's! After Max Brenner, we took a 30min walk back to the heart of the city to get the car. I had blisters on the sole of my feet from all that walking... and we both got quite sunburnt.