Day 1: Hobart CBD

The weather forecast was a few days of rain, clearing up just before we were scheduled to depart. We were hoping the forecast was wrong, but unfortunately it was right for today at least. It pretty much rained the whole day. Which is just as well, since, this was a free day in our itinerary for us to explore the city.

We had breakfast at McDonalds in the Cat and Fiddle Arcade, which is over 100 years old. We then walked around Elizabeth St north of the mall, and discovered it is located right next to the University of Tasmania city campus. The street is full of cheap restaurants, and has shops catering for the interests of the uni crowd. I saw a music centre, a record shop and a cycling shop.

We had a vegetarian lunch at the Thai Veggie Hut which was delicious. I will definitely come back here again.

After lunch, we stocked up on food from Woolworths in preparation for our tours over the next 3 days.

In the afternoon we saw some street art and decided we will do more street art exploration when the weather is better.

One thing I have noticed in Hobart is the amount of buildings with external fire escape stairs, like the ones we see in American movies.

For dinner, we walked around the city and discovered no less than 3 Malaysian/Singaporean restaurants:

• Kopitiam Singapore Cafe
• Taste of Malaysia
• Sawak Cafe

We were actually quite full and didn’t really need to eat, but the owner Caroline from Kopitiam convinced us her food is authentic. So we decided to order the fried prawn mee (also called Singaporean hokkien mee). What can I say, it is definitely the best version of this dish I have eaten in recent times, and we were so greedy we ordered the sambal bee hoon as well (which we couldn’t finish, but it was also nice). The owner Caroline and her husband started this business 10 years ago.