Pyrmont Bay

OK this is getting mildly ridiculous.  I travelled today to the fourth light rail station to grace Pyrmont a suburb so small you can walk across it in ten minutes.  I know this because I walked across it in ten minutes.  We slid out of the station serving the Star Casino and approximately fifteen seconds later pulled up at Pyrmont Bay.  The light rail runs more or less underground at this point.  I say more or less because while there is certain evidence of tunnels quite a bit of the journey seems to be through the basements of the buildings above us.

An escalator took me up to ground level at Pyrmont Bay and I stepped out into the rain.  To the left was The Star which I could probably have reached in the same amount of time if I had walked.  On my right was that vibrant hub of social intercourse and good natured enjoyment that goes by the name of the Pyrmont Bridge Hotel.  Directly opposite was the eponymous Pyrmont Bridge.  Also directly opposite was the water that Pyrmont Bridge permits you to traverse without getting your feet wet. 

Down at the water's edge is the National Maritime Museum.  The museum actually extends comfortably into the water as the biggest exhibits are ships tied up on the floaty stuff adjacent to the buildings themselves.  The main building has the word Mu-Sea-Um plastered across it in huge letters.  This is either a cute piece of word play or an indication of the current state of education in Australia.  Spelling difficulties notwithstanding the museum is quite impressive from the outside (I didn't go in) and I wandered around various ships that the museum had considered worthy of preserving for future generations.  Among them is an old Oberon class submarine which might find itself pressed back into service unless we can get our new submarine procurement moving at a somewhat less glacial rate.

There was also a wall celebrating Australia's history of immigration and noting us as a welcoming nation to newcomers.  Pretty much every nation that was built by immigration likes to retcon its history to show that they were always enamoured of the idea.  Generally speaking the attitude towards immigration hovers somewhere between disinterest and not sufficiently violently opposed to actually drown the newcomers down there at the dock.  Historical bodies with an eye for the tourist dollar then reinterpret this as a welcoming attitude towards migrants.  My own presence in this country is an indication that nobody drowned my father down at the dock, possibly because he came by air.  It's difficult to drown somebody on an airport runway.

Thus fully steeped in my nation's maritime heritage and with a new appreciation of our endless love for migrants I stepped away from the waterside and back into Pyrmont.  I didn't really have a destination in mind but set out towards what looked like a small park but turned out to be the garden around an apartment block.  Despite its population density Pyrmont doesn't have too much in the way of towering skyscrapers, rather there is just a vast amount of what I presume would be called medium density housing (or a country estate if you lived in Hong Kong).  I'm actually quite liking Pyrmont, its crowded and busy without giving the impression of being wildly overcrowded.  Possibly because I'm always here on weekends I turn up when most of the locals are visiting relatives elsewhere.

As with my journey to The Star it didn't take me long before I started bumping into things I encountered on previous stops in Pyrmont.  This time I actually managed to get almost as far as the fish market (as I said, a ten minute walk) but turned around just before I ran out of Pyrmont.  Fortunately this is the last station in Pyrmont because I'm pretty sure that if I spent much more time here the locals would start suspecting I was stalking them.