The next day we focused on the waterfront of the CBD (Central Business District, aka ‘downtown’).
We started by walking through the very nice Royal Botanical Gardens. Every Australian city (at least that I’ve been to) has a Royal Botanical Gardens, and Sydney’s was super nice. It’s right in prime real estate- on the water and with the city’s skyline rising up behind the trees.
From there we walked to the other side of Circular Quay to visit the historic Rocks neighborhood, the oldest neighborhood in Sydney. The Rocks is so named for the giant pieces of stone the neighborhood was built on. It has a very colorful history- convicts, salt of the earth marina workers, and a preponderance of bars gave it a checkered reputation until pretty recently.
For lunch, we went to the Rocks Foodie Market. It’s sort of like NYC's Smorgasburg but on a smaller scale. The Rocks also hosts a gifts and clothes market on Saturdays, which I visited last time I was in town.
We went to the Rocks Discovery Museum, which was good for context but wasn’t super exciting. I learned that when the settlers first landed there, they wiped out a huge section of the Aboriginal population with smallpox (sound familiar?). I also noticed one difference between early colonial Australia and early colonial America. Australia was settled about a hundred years after America, so I’d say that life was easier for the average colonial Australian with the modern luxuries that had been invented by the 1860s. (Life was not easy for the settlers that were in one of the penal colonies of course! I’m talking about free people).
Then we went on a tour of the Susannah Place Museum, which my inner history nerd really enjoyed. It’s very similar to the Tenement Museum in New York (which incidentally I’d also really recommend). Like the Tenement Museum, the tour tells the story of real families that lived in the four apartments at Susannah Place. When the buildings were built in 1844, the residents were solidly middle class. People lived in the buildings until relatively recently (despite the fact that the building never installed indoor plumbing!). My favorite factoid from the tour was that I learned the origin of the phrase ‘don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.’ The only running water the residents had access to was outside, and it had to be boiled as there was clearly no hot water heater. So, people only had a real bath once a week and used sponge baths in between. The mother of the household would heat up the water and put it in a large tin tub outside. The father got to bathe first, then the mother, then the children from eldest child to youngest. So, you had to be careful to not get rid of the baby when dumping the (probably filthy) water. Now you know too!
I had planned on doing one of the art museums in the afternoon, but we ran out of time. Instead, we went and checked out Darling Harbour, which is sort of a combination of New York’s South Street Seaport and Times Square (complete with a Madame Tussaud’s and Hard Rock Café). While the view of the marina was pretty nice, I was glad to have only spent 20 minutes there. Skip it!
