All the Way to China(town)

Friday night, Sydney University Village (where I'm staying) held an "Out of this World" party in the village bar. Usually, I'm not one to go to dorm or school sponsored parties, but here it seems to be a popular thing to do. So my friends and I decided to give it a try and it turned out to be really fun. The bar was decorated and they had a DJ that played very American music. Afterwards, we got Turkish food after which is always a good end to the night (falafel kebab = better than BK which is Northwestern's late night go-to food).

Saturday afternoon we decided to go down to Chinatown, which is near Darling Harbour. We had heard it was easy to find, but impossible to get out of. Supposedly, it's the black hole of Sydney. So, we decided to map out our plan, especially knowing how prone we are to getting lost. We took the bus there, and surprisingly didn't have any problems. We had to do a little searching to find the heart of Chinatown, but when we did, it was really cool. There's a big walkway, with trees that grew into an overhead canopy, and stores and restaurants everywhere. We were hungry (what else is new), so we found a huge food court to eat a late lunch/early dinner in. The stands had big picture menus, which was actually pretty overwhelming, especially since every place seemed to have the same stuff. After a long deliberation, I decided on Indonesian Fried Rice which was really delicious (and spicy!).

After our food, we walked around to the shops, a lot of which carry bad designer knock-offs. We went into a couple traditional Chinese shops, as well as a few touristy souvenir shops. In one store, we found Kangaroo Jerky... and creepily enough it had big pictures of kangaroos on the front. I mean, Beef Jerky doesn't have pictures of cows on the package. I thought about buying it as a souvenir, but decided I'd rather use my limited packing space for other things. After walking around for a couple hours, we decided to head back so we could get ready to go out. Luckily we didn't have any problems getting out of Chinatown, thanks to my honed sense of direction. Black hole? I think not.