Chocolate Revolution and Asian Invasion

Friday was another morning we could take slowly and head out with the anticipation of lunch downtown, but there was slightly more chaos around the house than usual. As I was preparing an apple with peanut butter for breakfast, a man came through wearing a portable vacuum/mop contraption on his back as Prince barked from the backyard. A couple of women also came to wash the windows, and while I am not accustomed to having others come in and help clean my house, I am not sure how customary that is here. One of the women brought her two-year-old son, so Julia and I took turns checking emails and keeping him from breaking too many of the toys Chris gave him. I'm sure he didn't know what to think about the way we spoke! How do you explain accents to a toddler? We just talk funny, I suppose.

Chris and Janet stayed home, involved with the cleaning, and Julia and I once again set off on the bus to York St., downtown. Once we got our bearings, we hoped that our strategy of wandering yesterday paid some dividends, despite not taking note of fun places we found by accident. This time at least, it did! Yesterday we had come across a place called Max Brenner's Chocolate Bar, which sounded intriguing, so we poked our heads in, and then decided to spend more than a few minutes there.

It is a cafe based entirely on chocolate, rather than coffee - what a novel idea! As neither Julia nor I are fans of coffee but we are of chocolate, this place is perfect for us. It is not necessarily perfect for our budget, but a treat, right? Apparently this Max Brenner character has a few other similar cafes around Sydney with different names, and we bought some chocolate as gifts for our families on our first visit but wanted to return today to try the hot cocoa. Her coconut-flavored hot chocolate and my mint-flavored both came in "hug mugs," with more of an egg-shape, pictured below.

On a chilly day in Sydney, it was worth it. And we schemed on how to bring the chocolate revolution back to our home country.

We felt the sweetness and warmth radiate through our cores, and we were set to take on the drizzles to come. Julia and I picked the Australia Museum as our wet-weather activity, so we got a chance to see more of Hyde Park (where we began and ended our sightseeing on day one).

Julia thought I was slightly crazy for following the ibises around to snap a few photos, but as much as I have seen them in Florida when visiting my grandparents, they have never been wandering around me this close before.

In one day we proved we could re-discover our accidental findings, and with the Australia Museum, Julia and I proved we also could figure out where we needed to go when we set our minds to it. The featured exhibit proved intriguing, and Julia just happened to match its advertisement with all of her natural beauty!

The Birds of Paradise exhibit was extremely interesting. It a multi-faceted, informative (but not obviously, annoyingly educational) look into Australians' relationship with nature through the history of the many varieties of birds of paradise, the Aboriginal peoples of this continent emulating the birds' beauty, and even how what we think of as modern society embracing the bright colors and showiness to attract mates.

The other exhibit we focused on was to help us learn and understand more about Australian aboriginal peoples. I really connected with the messages of a spiritual bond with the land and nature and the importance of an understanding of world, place, and self. At least as a white American, I felt this exhibit was extremely well-done as it was beautiful, informative, and able to critique and chastise the historical relationship between whites and Aboriginal peoples.

The biggest takeaway for me was that I had never heard of the practice that lasted over 150 years in which generations of babies were "rescued" (aka forcibly removed) from their families so they could grow up in "Australian" families and be assimilated. 100,000 kids grew up not knowing their history, not knowing their birth families, and not being allowed to ask questions. So many parallels can be drawn with the US' treatment of Native Americans as well. It is so frustrating to learn history sometimes, but building a consciousness is vital, especially as issues of race still permeate societies and probably always will. I am thankful the Australia Museum has worked to help its people and its foreign visitors understand more about what Australia is still working through in order to help its people heal and move forward to tackling current issues such as representation in the media, etc. Keep workin', Australia!

Both Julia and I found ourselves so deep into both of these exhibits that when we checked the time, it was 2:30pm and we had not eaten lunch! Thankfully we both had some snacks stashed in our bags even though we definitely did not expect to spend so much time at this one museum. With those two exhibits down, we felt like we had learned quite a bit already but still decided to take a spin through a couple more dedicated to Australian creatures. We could more skim these since we spent a couple hours with things that crawl, fly, run, and swim at Wildlife World and the Aquarium yesterday, but it was still fun to learn some about the ancient giants that used to roam these lands, such as the ancestors to kangaroos! I think we both got a little museumed-out at reasonably the same time, so while we originally had considered searching out others of Sydney's notable galleries, food was more important.

This time out we had cravings for Asian cuisine, but our failure to document our favorite spots the last couple days actually did hurt us today as we canvassed several blocks in the rain looking for this underground food court we had come across on the first day. Eventually we did find it for some Thai noodles but with a process slightly more irritating than it could have been.

Another silly thing is that our agenda took us next to the World Square and then to Chinatown, both of which were quite well-stocked with Asian cuisine. Asian cultural influences abounded in these two areas. We were not sure what the World Square was exactly, but we discovered it was a large shopping complex with restaurants, bars, and stores, where we ended up finding a couple cute stores and more food we enjoyed. I got really excited (more than I thought I would), when Julia wanted to explore the Asian bakery (where I introduced her to little pastries I had tried in China, Singapore, and Malaysia, such as a red bean bun - a soft, doughy, flat roll with a sweet filling made of red bean paste) and the Asian grocery store, where we came away with some rice crackers like my roommate Jessie brings from her own Chinatown in San Francisco. I truly had no idea how much I needed an Asian culture fix and how much tacit knowledge I had gained from my time on that continent (and from all my Asian friends at Carleton!).

When we took ourselves to Chinatown for actual dinner, we continued our Asian adventures by finding ourselves in a traditional northern Chinese hole-in-the-wall restaurant. I'm sure the restaurant staff got a kick out of us white girls trying to figure everything out, but I had a semi-idea of how to order us some rice, lemon chicken, and a sweet potato dish I had never seen before. That turned out to be the funniest part of our evening. These were sweet potatoes with hot toffee drizzled on top, which made them quite toasty to eat! I'm sure they were watching us attempt to tackle these potatoes, and our server eventually came over and gave us forks so that we would spear them and dip them in the mysterious bowl of water that had also been placed on our table - apparently it was for cooling our potatoes to eat them. Brilliant.

A day including a multitude of food adventures is the best kind of day in my book at least, and then we stumbled upon something even better for adventuring - a night market in Chinatown! Julia helped me resist the temptations of Asian desserts, and thankfully it was enough to soak in all the sights, sounds, and smells of the stalls, and even dash into (well, actually spend about twenty minutes) a DVD store.

We also happened to stumble upon a building whose second floor housed all the Asian arcade games one could need. I, for one, am happy about Asian cultural importation in Australia!

While it was late, Julia and I felt our night was not quite over. So we decided to walk over to Darling Harbour to see if anything special was happening there on a Friday night. In the process, we remembered the IMAX theater we had thought about visiting for a movie sometime. While we had both seen IMAX movies before, seeing one in Sydney would be special not only for the novel value, but also for the fact that it is the largest IMAX theater in the world!

We got tickets for the newly released, most recent Pirates of the Caribbean movie and got perfect seats in the back row for the 3D, ginormous screen wonders. The 8-story tall screen of Pirates coming at us was incredible, even if the movie itself was not spectacular. It still made for an entertaining finish to our Friday evening.

Final fun fact: the last couple days we also have heard Chris utter a phrase that I have only ever heard from Tigger on Winnie the Pooh: Ta-ta for now!