"A" is for Ashfield

It's scary! In a few days I'll have been in Australia for seven years! I'm getting old. It also quite scary that there are so many places in Sydney that I've never been to. So, Sha and I are going through the alphabet. "A" is rather obvious as Sha lives in Ashfield. I'd been to the railway station heaps of times (mainly to change trains to get to the Chinese embassy), but had never been out of the station. Ashfield doesn't have a particularly good reputation. The most recent news article was about a possible murder. One before was about an assault.

But Ashfield is actually quite nice. It's dominated by Chinese restaurants, Chinese people and Chinese supermarkets. The restaurants are called "Shanghai restaurant", "Shanghai dumpling restaurant", "New Shanghai restaurant" ... and so on. After eating jiao zi for five days running I decided that we should try food from a different country. We walked from one end of Ashfield to the other. The only option that we found was a Korean restaurant.

Wow, I've just found a site that tells you more than you'd ever want to know about Ashfield. Apparently, "The original inhabitants of the Ashfield area were the Wangal Aboriginal people. European settlement of the area dates from 1794". Apparently 10% of the Ashfield population are from China and 5% from Italy (so why couldn't we find a nice Italian restaurant?). 37% of the population are from non-English speaking backgrounds.

Sha and I had another great weekend just now ... where we went to "Browns Waterhole", but I'll write about that tomorrow.