Manly Beach

My boxes arrive at last!  Yippee!!!!  I remembered there being a lot more stuff! 

Ah well, at least I have more outfits to choose from now, some refreshing reinforcements, and you’d think a shipment just arrived from Mary Arnold the kids are so excited to see their own toys again.

Manly Beach

Another beautiful Saturday!  We head to Circular Quay at Sydney Harbour to catch a ferry to Manly Beach.

We decide to try the take-out fish & chips at the wharf because the line is promisingly long, we've been wanting to try fish&chips since it seems to be a national dish, and we're hungry.  They are really good, but you have to pay for your condiments - 40cents per tiny package of tartar sauce or ketchup.  I don't know if it's just us, but we seem to eat way more condiments than the Australians.  Once I specifically told a waiter, if you don't mind, we like a lot of tomato sauce, and he brought us two little packets.  At restaurants back home, our family of five can practically go through a bottle of ketchup in one sitting!  In any case, we had to pony up for the $2 ketchup in a little cup (made available for the Americans??).

It was a beautiful trip over.

Hubby enjoyed the voyage as well:  he got 3 stars on Angry Birds!  (or something like that)

We like stripes in our family.

Loved this restaurant.  Cool design, great view, yummy food...

"Can you please stop taking so many pictures??"

Australia's answer to the Shirley Temple:  Fire Engines.

 What says beachwear like black from head to toe?

Pleasure and pain

We ditch the kids and head to Longrain in Surry Hills for dinner.  Was similar to some uberhip downtown places in New York in that they have passive-aggressive seating policy, no reservations but you can sit at our bar for 2 hours while maybe we come get you, maybe we come get the couple sitting next to you who got there 15 minutes ago.  But fun cocktails to try and fun to see “downtown” Sydney.

Cuisine was Thai and supposedly one of the best restaurants in the city.  

The bar at Longrain

Very well done, but not totally my taste so didn’t feel that decadent to me.  I’m the kind of person whose spice threshold is around Tostito’s Mild Salsa.  Meanwhile my husband is the polar opposite; he enjoys the sensation of scalding the dorsal epithelium of his tongue off during the course of a meal.  For example, he may have a wasabi/hot pepper/chili moment where he freezes, his face turns red, eyes bulge, steam blows out both ears and he gulps eight glasses of water, and then he will exclaim, “Mmm, that was good!!”  This is not what I consider “pleasure.”  So he sometimes doesn’t even realize what spicy means for me.  Which is to say our meal was pretty spicy.  I could appreciate how masterfully prepared it was, the quality of the fish and meat and the subtleties of flavors, but ultimately a great meal doesn’t include pain to me, and even the “mild” dish we ordered was too much for my delicate tastebuds.  So maybe we’ll try a different cuisine next time.

We get home and experience the classic parental nightmare for the first time:  Julia walks in on us having sex.  She just blinks in the semi-darkened room and asks for water.  We’re of course concerned we have traumatized her, but then she didn’t ask any of the expected questions, such as, “What are you doing?” “Why are you naked?” “Why is Daddy’s penis in Mommy’s vagina?”  We were ready to contact a good child psychologist first thing in the morning, but she never mentioned it again.  Husband convinced that’s because she suppressed it and it will resurface twenty years later in therapy.  Fine, as long as it doesn’t resurface when her new school asks what she remembers most about her summer vacation come fall.