Paddington Market and a night at the Albury
We paid another visit to Paddington Market today to get another chunky address book, just like we had for Andy & Wendy the previous week. Manda decided she would quite like one of these herself, although given the bulk of it, it was questionable whether we'd now be under the flight baggage weight allowance!
Lunch was at one of Paddington's many trendy cafés (a place called Photo, oddly enough) although Manda's soup went down about as well as a joke about convicts in an Aussie pub. Andy joined us for a bite, then we all headed off to Glebe for another market.
Visitors at the airport
Glebe Market is a much more hippy kind of place, with people playing music in the park, half the stalls selling arty wares, the other half selling second hand tat. Philby could probably find a few old hoover parts here. We stayed for a while before Andy and I headed off on our own to the airport to meet friends who were stopping over briefly en-route from Cairns to Perth.
Like the previous night in the Regis, it seemed surreal to be chatting and having a beer with people you know from home just as if you'd gone to the local family pub for a Sunday afternoon social. But here we were catching up on news while our friends Martin and Donna were in between flights (and hoping that their luggage was automatically being transferred for them).
After the airport diversion, we headed back to Glebe and collected Manda outside the Broadway Shopping Centre. She was feeling tired after mooching around for some time on her own but had shown restraint by coming away with just one hair scrunchy - the budget was evidently running low now.
Pub crawl along Oxford St
After another evening meal in Bondi, Manda crashed out at 10pm, while I headed back out to town to catch up with Andy, Craig and Neil who were doing a pub crawl around the Oxford Street area. I can't remember any of the names of the places we went to, with one exception - the Albury Auditorium. Andy had mentioned this place on the very first night we arrived as we passed it on the drive to the flat. The Albury hosts drag acts nightly (think Priscilla and you're there), although we arrived so late that we'd pretty much missed the show. We did catch the tail end of some fat bloke in a dress with little make-up application skill singing "I am what I am".
Andy and I carried on drinking when we got back to the flat and had a good long talk about events over the last couple of weeks - not holiday stuff, but just things that weren't quite right. In all the time we'd been there, Andy and Wendy had hardly been together with us, and there were other little signs that things were not entirely rosy between them. I'd spoken to Craig about it earlier that evening, asking him if he knew what was up but he was saying nothing.
Things were rocky before we arrived, but they had tried to keep things from us so as not to spoil our holiday. It must have been awkward for them both. Andy and I talked for a couple of hours, eventually crashing out after 5am which was far too late given the next day's planned activity ...