Hotel Hoffman is Open

Hotel Hoffman is officially open for business, taking reservations through email or my old cell phone number (now rings to my apartment phone here).  It's located a short 25 minute walk to the Opera house and Darling Harbour, 10 minute ride to some great beaches and a 10 minute walk to some of the best restaurants in Sydney (or so the locals say, I can't vouch for all of them yet).  Room service is limited, but with the small farmers market outside on Saturdays it will have fresh, local food.  Pictures will be posted later this week.

I did do a little venturing out a few weekends ago and went up to Watson's Bay to do some walking around.  Watson's Bay is right on the head of Sydney connecting the ocean to Sydney Harbour.  It's a quick ferry ride from Circular Quay through the harbour, which was quite a nice view of the shoreline (and the houses that line the shorelines).

Once I got up to Watson's Bay I grabbed some fish and chips and then walked around for a bit.  There was a great view back to the city as well as the jagged cliffs along the shore.

Today was the coldest day in Sydney over the past few years (a brisk 41 degrees) so I'll have to hold off on the bridge climb until it starts to warm up. 

I have a few more pictures, but I'll post them on my flickr site later this week (http://www.flickr.com/photos/mbhoffman/).

International Haircuts

There's something nerve wracking about getting a haircut in a new country.  I remember getting a haircut in Rome a few years ago and getting a euro mullet and then having to figure out how to get it fixed when I spoke zero Italian and the girl spoke zero English.  While I didn't come out with a euro mullet here, it was just as scary.  The girl cutting my hair this go around kept going shorter and shorter and shorter to "get it even."  The problem is that if it goes too short I end up looking like Alfalfa after a few weeks.  So, it's been a few weeks and guess what.  Yep, Alfalfa.

The weeks wrapping up and it was a rough one.  Not the work as much as the "meetings."  I knew going in that the Aussies liked their beer, but I completely misjudged what like meant.  We hit up a Bavarian bar on Tuesday for beers and schnitzel (I think the schnitzels is the national food of Australia) with a vendor.  Beer turned into more beer and turned into more beer.  Then last night, we met up with some other people in the industry down here for some drinks.  Those beers of course lead into more beers.  At least after all that we ended up in Chinatown for some peking duck and dumplings.

Thankfully, the weeks over.  Not much on tap for the weekend.  The Wallabies are playing Wales on Saturday so I'll probably end up at a pub with a few people to catch the game (rugby union, that is).  Trying to find a place to go on holiday in August sometime, so we'll see if anything else pans out.  And if the rain holds off this weekend, hopefully I'll be able to go out and sightsee a little more.  Hopefully something interesting will happen that I'll be able to report back on.

My hope for food is restored

My hope for food in Sydney improving has been restored, finally.

With the World Cup in full swing and games at god awful times down here, we've been forced to stay up till the wee hours of the morning to catch as much of the US games as possible before crashing.  Friday/Saturday's game was at a reasonable midnight here so a bunch of us went over to Start City Casino to catch the game in the sports bar.  We stopped off for a few drinks at Darling Harbour and then grabbed some food at Ken's Tapas bar in the casino.  The food was, all in all good.  Portions were a little meager, but the food had some decent flavour to it.  Now, this could be because I was able to clean up at the tables in a scant 45 minutes, but I'd consider checking out a few other restaurants there.

I also ventured around Chinatown a little bit yesterday.  I think Chinatowns around the world are probably one of the safest (if you're adventurous) bets for a good meal.  Sure, you'll find a bunch of new and odd items on the menu (if they even post the menu in english) but if you take a gamble you probably won't be disappointed.  And the prices are so much more reasonable than other lunch spots, especially around Sydney.  I stopped off at a local food court and found Gumshara.  It's a small ramen noodle shop that had no one waiting in line.  Usually this would be a turn off, but after reading the signs, I took a gamble.

And boy did it pay off.  Apparently, the chef is "classically" trained in Japan to make ramen.  He takes 120 kilos of pork bones (260 pounds) and water to make his stock.  Nothing else.  The marrow and collagen in the bones give it a very intense flavour as well as turning it into a thick broth.  If he sold that alone, I'd probably take a few litres home to keep in the freezer.  One of the items on the menu was a pork spare rib ramen.  Now, I didn't ask why but on the menu it says only two are available each day.  I figured by 2pm they'd be gone, but thankfully there was still one left.

Other than crisping up the skin on the spare rib, I'm not sure how they cooked it.  But frankly, it didn't matter.  The only thing left in the bowl at the end was the bone.  I'd be hard pressed to try anything else in that food court after having that for lunch.

I've also started to venture deeper into my neighborhood to see what's around.  I've been taking different routes to the gym each night to see what's around.  And in just this past week I've found 3 or 4 worthy restaurants/wine bars that I've added to the list to try.  The neighborhood has a very strong cafe culture on weekends, but there are also quite a few small restaurants with only 20-30 seats.  Hopefully I'll be able to get to a few of them these next few weeks and hopefully the food quality continues to go up.

Summer : George : : Winter : Matt

One of the local TV channels this past weekend had a Seinfeld marathon.  They played every episode back to back. to. back. from the first season to the last.  One of the episodes I caught was the Summer of George.  To help me get the seasons straight in my head when talking to locals, I've decided to proclaim this the Winter of Matt.  To really try to get my butt in gear for the marathon, I signed up at a local gym with a CrossFit program.  I'm new to the whole CrossFit thing, but from what I've gathered is that it is intense, non-stop circuit training with trainers constantly yelling at you to go faster.  I'm pretty sure I could pay someone to work out for me at Equinox for what I'm paying here, but I've come to accept (but still won't stop complaining) about the costs here.  Seeing as though when I hobbled into the grocery store on my way home last night after the first training session I found a PINT of blueberries for $9.99.

Now that I finally have internet at my place, I'll try to post some pictures over the next few days.

Baby it's cold outside...

Well, I know I'm not going to get any sympathy for this comment, but it's been getting cold here.  Sure, by cold I mean 8 or 9 Celsius (46-48 for you in the other hemisphere), but it can be cold (cool might be a better term) early in the morning.  Since it has been getting cooler, I've been looking for restaurants and bars close by my place so I don't freeze travelling across town.  And luckily, there are three bars within spitting distance of my window that seem alright.

I was at one, the Flinders Inn, last week.  This is a new bar that is going for the feeling of a "dive bar like you'd find in the US".  I don't know which dive bars the owners went to in the US to get the decor, but I don't know if they went to the right ones.  Their main dive bar selling point is the ability to carve anything you'd like into their bar.  And while the music is rather eclectic, it was comical to hear "Baby It's Cold Outside" playing in June and seeing everyone put on their wool coats, hats and gloves to go outside for a smoke.

After last weekend's driving adventure I couldn't find any place worth risking my life to drive to this weekend so I'm going to sit tight in Sydney for the long weekend.  I'm planning on taking the ferry up to Manly to check up the beaches up north.  Sydney is also one of 5 or 6 FIFA Party Cities around the world so Darling Harbour is going to have two massive floating TVs in the harbour for all games.  Bear in mind, game times here are 9pm, midnight and 4:30am.  And of course, the Aussie vs Germany and US vs England games scored the coveted 4:30am time slot.  But, there are plenty of bars advertising they'll be open all night for all games.  So I'm debating if it's best to charge through the night or wake up and head to a bar then.

I also signed up for a Run Like Hell training session tomorrow morning.  It's a program helping people prepare for the City2Surf run in August.  Not really sure what it entails, but I'm guessing it will hurt, a lot.  And seeing as through marathon training isn't going so well, having some motivation would probably be a good thing.

Oh, and Happy Queens Birthday everyone.  Make sure to have a spot of tea crumpets on Monday in celebration.  I'll probably be sleeping off one heck of a hangover.

Stay Left, Stay LEFT, STAY LEFT!!!!

This weekend had a new milestone.  It probably took a good day maybe two off my life with the amount of stress that I put on my body in a short 7 hours yesterday.

That's right, I rented a car.  I had a few last things I needed to get from Ikea that I couldn't take on the train (namely a table and chairs and TV stand), so I rented a car.  And not just any car, but a bright shiny blue wagon.

Just to fill people in first, I didn't have a car for the 6 years I was in Boston and it was only the this past year that I had a ZipCar membership.  In a given year, I could probably count the number of times I drove using just fingers (and maybe toes).  So, needless to say I was a little nervous driving a car not just in a foreign country, but this was my first time driving backwards.  And no, I don't mean in reverse.  I mean driving on the left hand side of the road and the drivers seat on the right hand side of the car.  And for the people who thought I drove slow in Boston, you would have been dying of laughter when I saddled up behind gramps on the freeway because it was a comfortable speed for me.

Once I made it from the airport (should have gotten the navigation unit in hindsight) back to my place I thought I had a pretty good handle on it.  Of course I got lost and never made it to the highway from the airport so driving on the highway up to Ikea was interesting to say the least.  The best thing that the highways had were raised reflectors that would rumble as I drifted out of my lane.  That and my coworker who came along for the ride saying "Oh god" every time I got a little close to a curb, sidewalk or another car.  I had a hard time judging where the left hand side of my car was (as you can tell by how far I am from the right hand line the parking job above).  I would constantly drift into the left lane (or sidewalk) and would have to quickly move back.  I also took a few short cuts over curbs when going through the round-abouts and left hand turns.  The scenery, I was told, was pretty nice on the drive up, but don't really remember much other than my mantra of the day being "Stay left."  Even after 7 hours, I still had a hard time training myself to remember the small things:

• The blinker is on the right hand side of the steering wheel
• Wind screen lever on the left hand side
• The mirrors were useless to me because I kept looking above and to the right for the rear view mirror and looking out the side view mirrors was just confusing
• Getting into the drivers seat and not the passengers seat
• Learning when I could turn on red

Overall, I thought it was a success.  I returned the car in one piece, I was only honked at twice, avoided one potential disaster when someone opened up their door into oncoming traffic (ie. me) and I had to quickly swerve to not take off their door and I didn't use my horn or flip anyone the bird.  But that was probably because I was too nervous to take my hands off the wheel.

I tried to hook up a video camera in the dash for all you, but couldn't get it mounted to stay.  However, I did get one picture of a bottle shop (liquor store) that was pretty entertaining. 

If you look closely, it's a drive in bottle shop (a little taste of the midwest) and they're pretty proud that it's the last one before the freeway.  Thankfully I didn't see anyone drinking and driving, but I guess I'll have to keep my eyes peeled next time.