When bacon finished work that evening, I took him for a walk along the riverside…stunning views of people kayaking and swans racing calms my soul. There were loads and loads of bars along the riverside, in between apartment blocks and office blocks. Lovely.

I do love the idea of commuting to work in a boat, but unfortunately it is not to be with me perpetually landlocked

Seeing that it was a rare sunny day, we decided to stop somewhere for a drink. With overwhelming choice, bacon was being his usual undecided self. So I made an executive decision and we stopped at the Apple – an award-winning Bristollian institution serving up world-class ciders in a beatiful converted barge.

Showcasing an extremely huge variety of traditional ciders & perries, it was a huge task to choose one. I went with a cider named Happy Daze, whilst bacon went for the Cheddar Valley, which came out in a shocking Fanta orange color.

Mine was pleasantly tasty – sweet organic apples imparting the pressed apple juice flavour with no nasty after taste. The Cheddar Valley was a different story altogether – maybe it’s because you would really expect it to taste like Fanta Orange! It’s truly not that bad, but I had slight issues with the bitter after taste. The beautiful relaxing riverside views more than make up for it though – and with about 40 different variety of ciders at any one time, I’m pretty sure everyone would find their favourite cider in there. Traditional Cider always reminds me of the Cider Bus in Glastonbury – and this Cider Boat kinda makes up for it

The Apple Cider Co. Ltd
Welsh Back, Bristol,
BS1 4SB

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Friday night’s dinner was for me to curb my craving for fresh sashimi. Mmm…love sashimi. So we went to Masa, which was just literally around the corner from our hotel

There was the usual teppanyaki counter in a corner with a more central sushi counter complete with conveyour belt. Not many things going around seeing that it was still fairly early, so we took a window seat instead

I am starting to see a trend here. The sushi master and the bloke manning the bar were both Malaysian. Chatting in Hokkien, they probably thought they were pretty safe from anyone eavesdropping in on them. They were literally shouting over my head about how long will it take them to do their laundry that night – whilst I tried very hard to contain my smirk. Why is it that most sushi chefs in the UK are from Malaysia? I don’t think its because we look Japanese…so why? Bizzare.

We ordered salmon & tuna to start off -yum.

Bacon had the chilli beef udon – which came as ramen and way too overly seasoned with MSG. Not nice

I ordered the tempura bento set – it is not often that I go for bentos, but I really fancied miso soup and the wakame salad.

The rice was nicely cooked, the wakame salad was properly dressed – however, the tempura was definately undercooked. It does not even look brown – not to mention that the the sweet potato & aubergine was not even cooked. An anti-climax definately. At £10 I guess its not that expensive, but I would pay an extra £5 for a properly cooked tempura. Not to mention that one of the tempura was what seemed like leftover cooked teriyaki chicken coated in tempura flour….like HUH?

The fresh sashimi did put me on, but our main course was definately a dissapointment. Not somewhere I would recommend wholeheartedly – however if you’re going for the sashimi only then this place is not bad.

Masa Japanese Restaurant
42-46 Baldwin St
Bristol, BS1 1PN
0117 929 3888‎

After the whirlwind trip to Bristol earlier in the month, I was impatient to have a proper walk around the city to get a good feel of it. With bacon heading down to Bristol for work over the weekend, I booked us into the Mercure Brigstow, which I saw on my way into Bristol in the taxi

What attracted me most was the lovely river views, located in front of the Glassboat Restaurant. I love water views of all sorts, so it was pleasing to be able to see the river from the room window..you can get an upgrade at £10 to a higher level room to overlook the trees

Lovely room, HOWEVER, what really made me fall in love with this hotel is the tv in the bath..how amazing is that??

Excellent location, it was literally a 3 mins. walk to the lovely St Nicholas Market

St Nicholas Market is definately my sort of market. A large variety of arty crafty stalls outdoors, the permanent indoor stalls is a good mish mash of independent clothes and accessories stalls, with a pub or two outside. And of course, a really cool variety of foodstalls.

I had lunch at the moroccan cafe that you could see on the left of the picture above – a platter of Moroccan Lamb with couscous at £6.50 was very reasonable I reckon. My only complaint was that the sauce the lamb was cooked it was slightly oily – with lamb being fairly fatty anyway this is no suprise. I am just more used to a tomato-based morrocan stew recipe.

I love how it’s cooked with dried apricots & date – yum. And there was enough lamb to mop up the couscous as well, which is fabulous.

Although I must admit that being sat right opposite the increasingly long queue for super-cutesy pieminister did make me regret not going for a pie slightly. But I have had pieminister before, and it had been ages since I’ve had proper moroccan food, so pie was out

The market also contain a proper italian store run by proper italians, a Bristol Sausage stall, a Carribean stall and a middle eastern stall serving up delicious looking olives with kebabs. Oh, and not forgetting a lovely smelling sidestall selling cheese on toast…the smell is heavenly. However, for Saturday’s lunch I thought me and bacon could go to Portugal…

Nothing fancy at all, it was named Portuguese Taste, with four cramped tables seating four each. I seriously had no clue what’s going on with the menu, as I had never had portuguese food before. So I just picked the one that sounds the strangest. Feiyoada sounded good enough. Which was probably a good thing, as it tasted heavenly

It is a delicious stew consisting of melt-in-the-mouth pork ribs with belly pork, cooked with red kidney beans, chorizo, spinach and tomato concasse. Served over rice, this was absolutely delicious. Yummy yum yum,

And being Portuguese, they of course serves up freshly baked Portuguese egg tarts

At £1 each, this is not cheap, but definately heavenly and so worth the £1. I bought 6, but was very tempted to just buy his whole tray! Crispy pastry holds in super soft egg custard mixture that literally melts in your mouth, this stall was definately a melt-in-your-mouth eatery. Incomparable I say.

Burp**

Coming up tomorrow: The rivers & moving on to Japan

It’s been a long but exciting and interesting summer being involved with the #me2sydney project…I would like to thank these people for coming to my aid :
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Katie’s sport(ing) family for coming out to play Wicked Wicker Wicket
Zona, Dreyb & Lisa for inspiring the Sydspired capsule collection.
Zona who inspired me to create the much-loved Breakfast on the Bridge monument. And of course Katie for making that delicious ANZAC monument!
All the creative peeps from the twitterverse that contributed in creating the thoroughly unique merrijig – with Katie completely taking over the reins whilst I spend the week at hurricane country that is Cornwall.
All those that turned up for my awesome Sydney event
All those that commented to aid me in coming up with the Awesome Guide to Sydney & NSW
Katie & Zona, for agreeing to a confessions piece for the Awesome Guide to Sydney & NSW
And Katie again for being my very valuable second-in-command, always excited and inspired by the whole #me2sydney project!

Oo, and Tourism NSW & 1000 heads for giving me the chance to participate in this experiment. And not forgetting all those that have commented along the journey! I hope I have inspired many of you to start planning your pilgrimage to Sydney, I know I have inspired MYSELF..:)

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To relieve the magic all over again, just click here to get to all posts tagged with Sydney. All twitter conversations, retweets and comments are (mostly) hashtagged #me2sydney. As for me, I’m now at Bristol for a weekend of eating, drinking, shopping and sleeping…I deserve a break after working so hard! I can now reveal that each entry took me an average of 12 hours to create/blog/video/write/edit (not including the hours needed to plot and brainstorm!) – with the Sydspired collection taking about 20 hours and the Breakfast on the Bridge taking me 4 hours. So yes…I so throughly deserve a break!

View from Sydney Towers

Phew, what a journey and a half !!

With week 6′s submission, I looked back to 2006, when I was plotting my Christmas escape to the shores of Sydney. It’s always very exciting planning for new sights and sounds, but with the plethora of information out there, it was just all abit too much. You could get a Lonely Planet guide book, or alternatively just print stuff out from travel sites or travel blogs. I did both. The Lonely Planet book proved to be a little too heavy to bring everywhere, whilst the printouts from travel sites was one too many piece of random loose-leaf paper for me.

What I needed was a short but sweet guide to the things not-to-be-missed in Sydney, with a similar amount of attention paid to the things to do off the beaten path . I didn’t want to dictate to-do lists on a day-to-day basis; your Sydney experience should be laid-back like Sydneysiders, not rushed, hurried and structured . Step into the sunshine and smell the salty sea breeze. Under the shadows of the Opera House or at Luna Park – your choice!

With input from you lovely people incorporated into ‘lessons learnt’ in the past six weeks, I included my real life experience in Sydney into a handy guide for an awesome time. I have designed this to be a comprehensive enough guide that you can carry with you everywhere – I for one would’ve loved to have this for me to read on the long flight over. I will definately be bringing this guide with me on my next trip to Sydney, it should fit in nicely for explorers planning to spend a week in Sydney.

I must stress that this is by far not a comprehensive list, but it is most definately the list that I would say define what Sydney is for me. Fun, sunshine, amazing people, lovely animals and beautiful eceletic food. I don’t think I would be able to hand-on-heart declare that I have explored Sydney inside out even if I was there for a full month – so here are my ‘best bits’ as they would say in Big Brother.

I present to you, the Awesome Guide to Sydney & NSW in pdf!

All pictures in the #me2sydney series (including this guide) have been taken by yours truly on my trip to Australia in 2006…none of that ripping off flickr rubbish! I have thoroughly enjoyed my #me2sydney experience, and I hope you had as well! I’m sad to see the end of #me2sydney, but feel privileged that I walk away from this experience with a good feel of the essence of Sydney. This blog had become so Sydney-centred that a PR company hunting for bloggers to attend their media event in Leeds thought my blog was actually BASED in Sydney!

Now, can you pretty pretty please send me to Sydney so I can use my own guide??

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ON MY GUIDE. PLEASE DO NOT REPRODUCE WITHOUT PERMISSION FOR ANY COMMERCIAL USE WHATSOEVER

It’s now week 7, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the virtual tour through Sydney (and NSW!) that www.sourrain.com have brought you. Week 6 (the very very last!!) is all about playing tourguide in NSW, and here is where I need your opinion peeps!!!! What have you enjoyed most so far in my journey throughout Sydney & NSW?

Or is there something that you think I’ve missed? What would be a perfect takeaway for you to start your journey to Sydney, what have inspired you the most in my little project?

Here are more links of the interesting activities/places that I have not managed to touched on in my 6 weeks in Sydney – perhaps you would like me to elaborate on these instead?

* Try Paddle Surfing
* Visit the Bondi Icebergs Club
* Cuddle a Koala
* Enjoy classic pub fare and ales at the Lord Nelson
* STA’s suggestions

Forgot where I’ve taken you in the past 6 weeks? Here are where we’ve been. For a reality check, here is my travelblog from my trip to Sydney in 2006 (ignore the Melbourne bits ).

Go on then, TELL ME!