South
I am a sucker for adventure. For colour. For moments of frivolity. And for that reason, waking up at 6h00 to catch a train to Sydney for the day with a couple of good people seemed like a good idea yesterday.
Recently I've used my camera which I bought for my travels abroad quite a lot. It has been sitting, previously to this, on a stack of old Yen and Frankie magazines, collecting dust instead of collecting memories. And so, I thought, I should start to make use of something which did set me back a fair whack of money.
Matt, Lacey and I caught a train and played twister with our limbs on the way down to Sydney yesterday with the plan of walking, talking, eating and viewing some art. Another past time of every visit to Sydney ever has been getting lost for hours in book shops. So we thought it only fitting to spend a third of the time we had yesterday doing exactly that.
We had breakfast in the forgotten streets of Chippendale at a sweet little coffee shop called Something For Jess. After catching an early morning train, I always come here to start a day in Sydney. It's hidden away, a no nonsense, easy going and quiet little spot to recoup or prepare for the busyness of the city. We had good coffee, good breakfast (I am a sucker for the under $10 breakfast options they have, and believe all cafés should respect this price limit more often), and good chats. I got a video of Matt winking and it's pretty fantastic.
We wandered the streets of Chippendale before ending up walking along King Street in Newtown, stopping in at Gould's Bookshop. Lacey and I mused cynically over erotica novels and talked like girls whilst Matt kept tracing the spines of books with his fingers to find a Le Carré novel that he didn't have. A cat kept us company and showed us it's butt more times than we had hoped.
Beer at the Newtown Hotel (it's unavoidable, that place) and lunch at Lentil As Anything was followed by a train trip back in to the CBD where we stopped in at the Museum of Contemporary Art and behaved like neanderthals and Matt modelled for the camera like the self-obsessed creature that he is. The camera loves that boy. We got caught up in the city again and whisked away to Kinokuniya to cry about all the books we wanted that we couldn't afford, and my mind was littered with thoughts and musings to put into my own words. Such an inspirational place for thought, a bookstore is.
Perhaps what was the best part of the day was the constant and ever changing conversation and how it was, on the other hand, broken up by content silence. Spending time with creative, intellectual minds and jumping from topic to topic (we arrived into Central Station discussing the ethics and moral pros and cons of organ donation) was a real treat. My mind is now swirling with thoughts and different view points on all sorts of areas of society and academia. My body may have gone on an adventure yesterday, proven by the struggle of walking up stairs to my bed last night, but my mind was the more exhausted part of me. And the feeling of crawling into my bed and wrapping myself in sheets was a reminder to do this more often.
