A couple bright spots in the middle of a miserably rainy day

So it’s kind of a gross Saturday in Sydney. Overcast and drizzly. I was going to attempt to walk across the bridge today, to see how long the walk is and if that can be my route of choice to work (I’ve held off on buying a long-term train ticket until I at least try it out) but because today is miserable and tomorrow’s supposed to be sunny, I’m holding off. But I still did have a few errands I wanted to get done in the city today, so I decided to still go, but go by train. But I discovered that due to railworks, the train doesn’t run from my station on weekends for now. They do substitute buses instead, and because it’s just for this one link of the train that’s down over the weekend and some people will still need to pay for their connecting trains, it’s free!

Anyway, one of the things that I had decided I needed to do in the city today was get a Krispy Kreme donut. Because I was thinking, I have been so good since I’ve been here, I have literally not had a single piece of junk food aside from one little Aero bar, and I haven’t had a Krispy Kreme since forever and there’s one right by my city train station that’s been taunting me and calling my name every day. But once I got to the city, I decided that I’d run my other errands first and get my donut on the way back.

However, I ended up in this labyrinth of malls where you just keep walking on and on forever and one mall links to another and eventually you’ve walked blocks underground and start thinking “I’m not going to remember the way back!” and then I spotted cupcake heaven. I snapped a picture of the cupcake store, but the photo just didn’t properly capture the utter cute pinkness and cupcake-ness of the store and the rows and rows of awesome cupcake varieties, so I’ve just taken a photo of the cupcake I ended up buying. Krispy Kreme was pushed to the back of my mind; red velvet cupcakes were calling my name. Well, Krispy Kreme wasn’t totally forgotten, though, because I started thinking “maybe my lunch today will be a cupcake and a donut”. So much for my no-junk food streak. However, after the cupcake, I just had an overwhelming feeling of sugar overload in my mouth and couldn’t really have handled a Krispy Kreme, and then I passed a fruit stand, and suddenly strawberries and melons were calling my name, so I wasn’t too grossly unhealthy today. Krispy Kreme, I’ll catch you Monday.

Although I did also notice on the way back that there is yet another amazing cupcake store right next to the Krispy Kreme that I had somehow missed before. Dangerous. The other one at least took effort to get to so I'd have to be really determined.

The other major thing I was trying to get done today was to set up my Blackberry on a local service, but I wasn’t successful. :( As a temporary resident, they need me to provide “proof of residence” which has to be a utility bill or bank notice received at my address, can’t be any of the documentation I have from moving in. Boo. They mentioned I could go somewhere else for pre-paid, so I will probably end up doing that if I don’t decide to set up a local bank account soon, but the month-to-month plan looked like a pretty good deal. A problem to be solved another day…

But the other bright spot is, I went to the crappy tiny grocery store nearby for a quick trip, and this time I noticed that in spite of their tiny size, they do have a lot more inventory that I overlooked on my first jetlagged day, so it might be more useful than I thought. A lot more inventory including…. CLOTHES HANGERS, woooot! Only place I’ve seen them. So that was a little pick me up after my Blackberry disappointment, although I didn’t buy as many as I need because I would have bought out the store and still been lacking, and because a coworker mentioned she might be able to buy me some this weekend from one of those bigger K-Mart style stores they have out in the suburbs that I can’t get to.

And one random thing I spotted in the crappy little grocery store: a can of “Creaming Soda”. Not cream soda. Creaming. Sounds... um. And it was just this one random can on the condiments shelf. I circled the store a bunch of times to try to find the source of the creaming soda, but it was the only one. I almost bought it out of pure curiosity, but then I thought maybe some other customer had bought it elsewhere and accidentally left it on their shelf (or maybe looked at it again and said “Why did I buy creaming soda? That sounds gross!” and purposely left it there) and there would be a lot of confusing questions at checkout (more confusing than “cash out?”) so I left it on the condiments shelf. It’s probably for the best.