Life In Australia

Today, I am participating in the second World Blog Surf Day, a virtual world tour of expat blogs on the wonderful theme of food. World Blog Surf Day has been organised by Czech Off the Beaten Track as a cool way of traveling the world at no cost and seeing it through the eyes of the expats who live in each country.

Thanks also go to Anastasia Ashman, “Thandelike,” on Twitter for her work on Twittering about World Blog Surf Day. She will be “tweeting” about each participating blog, and will include each blog URL.

Anastasia Ashman is an American cultural producer based in Istanbul, and is a creator of Expat Harem, the anthology by foreign women about modern Turkey. Her Tweetstream focuses on women, travel and history and she shares resources for writers/travelers, expats, Turkophiles & culturati of all stripes.

If this is your first visit to a World Blog Surf Day site, continue on the journey by clicking the link at the bottom of this blog post. And now for my contribution to the second World Blog Surf Day….

Sydney has a wide variety of places to eat, established by immigrants from
Europe, the Middle East, Asia and other parts of the world.

Just to give you an idea of the range of food available, the following eating places are located within a radius of approximately one mile from where I live:

• A Chinese takeaway
• A Thai takeaway and restaurant
• An Australian pub with a barbeque on which you can cook your own steaks!
• A gourmet pizza takeaway
• An Indian restaurant
• An Indian takeaway
• A sandwich shop which sells delicious gourmet sandwiches
• A Turkish takeaway
• A couple of Japanese sushi bars
• An Italian restaurant

and, imported from the USA, we have McDonalds, KFC, Subway, Pizza Hut and Hungry Jacks (the Australian equivalent of Burger King - I don’t know why it is called Hungry Jacks here as they sell Whoppers, etc).

There are undoubtedly several other places that I haven’t yet encountered or have forgotten to mention but that gives you an idea of the enormous variety of food on offer in just one small area of Sydney.

I love eating out in restaurants, but, unfortunately, we haven’t been able to afford to eat out very often since we arrived here. However, I must mention two absolutely fabulous restaurants that we have been fortunate enough to eat in.

The first is the Heritage Belgian Beer Café. It is in the Rocks area of Sydney, which is the oldest part of the city, the area where the first settlers took up residence.

However, as soon as you step into the Heritage Belgian Beer Café, you feel as if you have been mysteriously transported to Brussels, Antwerp, or another Belgian town, where you suddenly find yourself in a café. It’s not very surprising that you should feel like this, since all of the fixtures and fittings came from Belgium and the interior was designed by a Belgian designer. There are some fabulous photos on the Belgian Beer Cafe’s website, which give you a good idea of what the interior is like.

Belgium is renowned for its wide variety of beers and a large number of imported and authentic Belgian beers are on offer at the Heritage Belgian Beer Café. The cherry-flavoured Kriek is my favourite Belgian beer, which I am able to enjoy here in Australia at the Beer Café (and probably nowhere else!)

Now onto the food…the menu at the Heritage Belgian Beer Café includes both Belgian and Australian dishes. The highlight for me, though, is the mussels. They are brought to your table steaming hot in a large stainless steel pan. You can choose from several different sauces in which they are cooked – my favourite is the Provencale sauce with tomatoes, herbs and garlic. The mussels taste wonderful – so fresh and succulent. I forget that I am in Australia and feel like I am once again in the old part of Antwerp eating mussels and drinking Kriek in a café!

A little tip – on Wednesday evenings, mussels are half-price, but be sure to book a table because the café is always packed! 

Another restaurant that I very much enjoyed visiting was the Löwenbräu Keller, a Bavarian (German) restaurant and bar, also in the Rocks area of Sydney. We’ve only been to this restaurant once and it was on a warm summer evening. We sat outside and we could have been in the Altstadt (Old Town) in Duesseldorf, Cologne or another German city. The waiters and waitresses wore traditional Bavarian dress – Lederhosen (leather trousers or pants) for the men and dresses with full skirts for the women.

There were authentic German beers on offer and a menu in both English and German with a range of German dishes. We chose the “Schlachtplatte” and, unbelievably, it fed the whole of our family of four! It was a large plate of several different Bavarian meat dishes, served with mashed potatoes and sauerkraut (pickled cabbage). The roast pork belly was cooked to perfection – very tender and just a little crispy. The sausages were delicious – my daughter couldn’t stop eating them. The sauerkraut was excellent – it didn’t taste acidic as sauerkraut has a tendency to do. After the meal, we were all so full that we couldn’t face a dessert, which was a shame!

I’m sure that there are many more restaurants in Sydney that give a taste of their country of origin, not just in the food but also in the atmosphere. Such places are part of the multi-culturalism of Sydney and add to the city’s vibrancy. They also seem to make the world a much smaller place. Australia is quite an isolated country but you do not really experience isolation in Sydney since there are so many connections to the rest of the world through the people who make up the city’s population.

Now that I feel hungry, I will direct you to the next blog on our virtual world tour! Don has moved from San Francisco to the Australian city of Melbourne and he writes about his experiences on his blog, 12,767 Kilometers. Melbourne is on my list of places to visit, so I will be very interested to hear what Don has to say about eating in Melbourne! Click here to read Don’s blog post.