Saturday 1 August 2015

Just happened to walk down Foveaux Street

This photo shows the building site on Foveaux Street where the taxi depot used to be; no doubt there are new residential apartments going up here. I didn't plan to go down Foveaux Street when I set out this morning however. It just happened that way.

I left home around 10am and went across the Pyrmont Bridge into the CBD, stopping briefly at the mobile phone shop underneath Myer. There, I asked about cleaning the power socket of my five-year-old iPhone 4, which had gummed up with lint and stuff from my pocket having never been cleaned in that vicinity before. The technician on the little stool in the tiny shop in the underground arcade took my phone from me and proceeded to use tweezers to dig all the fluff out of the gap around the power connector. And they didn't charge me anything either - even though I had a $10-note ready to whip out - so if you need any work done on your phone, go to them, they're very obliging.

After emerging in Pitt Street Mall I turned south and walked up Pitt Street, crossing Park Street and sauntering along the almost-empty weekend CBD pavements. I admired the YMCA building ("1907") which is now just the facade of a Meriton residential tower, and the Edinbugrh Castle Hotel on the corner of Bathurst Street. I turned up Bathurst and crossed Elizabeth Street into Hyde Park, then got onto Oxford Street thinking that maybe I would go to the Paddington Markets for a change. Instead, at Taylors Square I turned down past the fountain and the lovely old Belgenny Building onto Bourke Street heading into Surry Hills, then turned right at Fitzroy Street, which transitions at that point into Foveaux Street.

On the corner of it and Crown Street at Shannon Reserve there was a flea market and I stopped by there for ten minutes or so and had a quiet stroll among the stands of books and bric-a-brac set up on tables erected on the grass plots. It was by now almost 11am and warm for winter, and I noticed all the young women wearing summer tops and skirts. At the exit on Crown there was a man with an ancient prosthetic leg slung over his shoulder talking with a young woman holding vertically a bugle attached to a rubber bladder. She was consulting her phone.

I turned down Foveaux again and passed under the rail line at Central Station, crossing Eddy Avenue into the park. After going through it I crossed over Pitt Street and headed up Pitt to World Square where I attended to nature and then paid for and ate a container-full of nachos with spicy pulled pork chipotle. I then walked up George Street and popped into Kinokuniya to get some books for mum; she had asked me for books when I went to see her yesterday at the nursing home. Then it was through the QVB and down Market to the bridge, and home. On the way I bought a large flat-white at the Vietnamese noodle-shop-and-cafe on Harris Street after helping an enormously tall young Korean (Korean?) man find his way to the Fish Markets.

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