Hobart shopping guide

This list is far from exhaustive I'm sure, but here are some short notes about the best spots for a browse and a buy that I found whilst in Hobart. Most of these places specialise in creations from small-scale Tasmanian designers or local artisan food producers, meaning that you can get your hands on some unique and yummy things. Also take a peek at my general thoughts on the lovely city of Hobart here.

Hobart visiting guide

My first impression of Hobart was formed through a haze of 4.30am weariness, but the barbarity of the 6.00am flight was more than made up for by the chance of catching the view as we descended: the sunrise’s last glows over layers of rolling hills, mountains and glimmering bays. Below, snatches of lovely straight white beaches, green farmland, and forest. First thing to note: Hobart really is pretty!

You've got me up against the wall

Any sets of photos from my travels or my wanderings will inevitably end up punctuated by lots of snaps of ostensibly mundane but enchanting things - walls, doors, and windows, for instance. Isolated from the hum-drum of street life, taken out of the context of their greater buildings, these details can be really lovely, an architectural 'moment' of intimacy. So, here's a (very small) sample of some of the many walls,

’Twas in that place o’ Scotland’s Isle

Edinburgh, in my mind and recollection, is a city of theatrical contrasts: Old Town and New Town, vastness and intimacy, drama and comfort. I traveled there in a particularly cold winter, only intensifying this sense.

On the one hand, Edinburgh is a place of great spatial spectacle. Not a very large city, it is set upon a series of

Queen Street, Croydon

Queen Street seems to be just springing onto everybody’s lips in Adelaide, making a claim on some local buzz as a spot for breakfast if you’re tired of Hutt Street or Hyde Park, and a location for dreamy Saturday lurking. It's also a bit of an arts hub, home to some of the 2011 SALA venues and hosting a mid-winter street party for the opening of the festival.

Someone else's Melbourne

Here are some bits and pieces that caught my eye whilst walking around and about the Glenferrie Road area. It’s all so wonderfully, redolently Melbourne: the light catching on crumbling Victorian plaster alongside bright and new and shiny architecture, the cables drooping above the tram lines, faded but sunshiny skies, spires and graffiti from the train station.

And that was New York

As a lover of cities, of the pavement and the steel, of the bustling shops, the rushing people, I have been wanting for sometime now to put down in words my experience of that ultimate metropolis, Manhattan.

A Walk in My Melbourne

It’s late afternoon on a Wednesday in August, late winter in Melbourne. I’ve ventured out from my native Carlton North, heading out on foot to cross Nicholson Street, the Carlton-Fitzroy border and a mental barrier between my territory and the unknown. Ostensibly a rare act of exercise (I have on my trackies and runners left over from school hockey trainings

Urban marvel 1959: The Lonely Londoners

Reading Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, the narrative of West Indian immigrants in post-war London, I was struck by this passage which rather sums up the power of a city to enthral its inhabitants, to inspire a sense of real romance and imaginative possession. You could so easily substitute the streets, squares, and haunts of your own city:

Oh what it is and why it is, no one knows, but to have said: ‘I walked on Waterloo Bridge,’ ‘I rendezvoused at Charing Cross,’ ‘Piccadilly Circus is my playground,’ to say these things, to have lived these things, to have lived in the great city of London, centre of the world. To one day lean against the wind walking up the Bayswater Road (destination unknown), to see the leaves swirl and dance and spin on the pavement (sight unseeing), to write a casual letter home beginning: ‘Last night, in Trafalgar Square…’ What is it that a city has, that any place in the world has, that you get so much to like it you wouldn't leave it for anywhere else?

A poem on the underground

I love the subway. Any city, any system, there is just something wonderful about those rattling old trains hurtling at break-neck speed through subterranean tunnels. The subway is hot, it is crowded, it is grimy and rat-infested, it has the power to ruin your day with its delays and abrupt route alterations, and yet I love it.