Day Twenty-Nine: Shopping Downtown (CBD)

I have waited for a month...A MONTH...to go shopping. Living next to the second largest mall in Australia hasn't really help..now does it..heh heh.

My roommate, Kelsey, and I were both so pumped about going shopping!! We have planned for 2 weeks and ever since we arrived in Sydney, we have seen so many shops..attractive and luring...we have wanted to do this forever.

So...all bright and early, we waited for our train at platform 2. 5 minutes turned into 10 minutes, then into DELAYED. Something happened down the track. Ambulance, fire trucks, police they all came. We were dismissed from the station. What a great start to our day =S

The bus took about 45 minutes. We first went to get some lunch at Hungry Jack. Hungry Jack is Burger King in the states. They had whoppers...taste of home =). Some observations: Hungry Jack is more popular in Australia than McDonald's. It is cheaper than McDonald's here or rather I think it is reasonable priced for hamburgers.

Okay now the shopping. Queen Victoria Building (http://en.structurae.de/structures/data/index.cfm?ID=s0038551):
yes!! This is a mall. Splendid and elegant! It is built in 1898 as a monument to the long reign monarch. You wouldn't want to buy anything here; it is super duper overpriced. A dress costs AT LEAST $300. You go there for the architecture.

Next we went to Town Hall arcades. Well, what can I say....shopping here is harder than I thought it would be. The stores are usually very small and with one salesperson, maybe two at the most. And..heh heh..most stores don't have customers. We felt intimidated going into those stores. So basically we just walked, walked, and walked some more.

For those stores that we did stop in...it was hard to find something we like or even fashionable. They still have shoulder pads here man!!! SHOULDER PADS...good god >.<. And there is something laces here too....lace here, lace there, lace everywhere and on anything. It was rare to find something that we like from top to bottom, front to back. There was always something (a HUGE flower in the front, fringes from your shoulders, laced back) that made the design unbearable. It seen to me that fashion here is outdated, but then again what do I know about fashion to say so *shrug*. Even if we found something we like (frankly, at this point, we just want something normal), the material that it is made out of makes me feel gross wearing it =(

We shopped for about 5 hours, and I only got a pair of shoes:

And poor Kelsey got nothing =(

We Failed.

Oh yeah, another thing that made it harder to shop is the fact that the stores are unfamiliar. There are no AE, Banana Republic, GAP(or at least I didn't see)..so we didn't know what stores suit our age more, or where stores specializes in what kind of clothing, and of course we don't know the price range of the type of the stores.

Sigh~~