'Social distancing' in the food court and the car park

Hornsby Westfield shopping centre on Monday. It's often hard to get a seat in the food court. Now you can't have one either, but for different reasons.

'Social distancing' made easy

The Covid-19 Coronavirus pandemic requires that we practise 'social distancing'. This presented no problem today at the normally bustling Chatswood Westfield shopping centre!

I kept away from the supermarket toilet paper aisle though. It's a different story there.

猪年 - Zhū Nián - (Year of the Pig)

This post is in red because there's an awful lot of red around at this time of year, especially in suburbs blessed with a large Chinese presence.

It's about to be Chinese (Lunar) New Year again, and this year will be the Year of the Pig. Not just any pig, but the golden pig, the one that comes only once every 60 years. Babies born this year will grow up to be extremely prosperous.

I went along to Chatswood to get a feel for it all.

There were lots of pigs around, red ones and gold ones, and there was an excellent little concert going on, with music and displays of traditional dancing.

Every shop in the Westfield Shopping Centre was taking part in a well-coordinated New Year's discount campaign. I noticed this shoe shop was offering 88% off any shoe purchase. I think that may be something to do with it's bad luck to buy shoes during this period (but if you do, 8 is always lucky, and 88 more so).

You also need to wear red undies (I bought mine today), and you mustn't wear black or white (the colours of death). It's a difficult time if you're superstitious. Here's a guide, courtesy the Sydney Morning Herald: SMH Chinese NY guide
 

We're invited to a New Year's party next weekend, so we're researching all this carefully. The shopping centre had lots of helpful tips in this informative zodiac-specific display. After all these years on the planet, I learnt what my lucky colours are: blue, grey, and orange. I went off and bought myself an orange shirt straight away.

Extreme postcodes: 2770

Blackett is one of the many suburbs in the far west that I'd not heard of. What have I been missing out on?

Well, its claim to fame is that it has (by a small margin) the lowest house prices in Sydney. There are a lot of unknown suburbs out here with low (by Sydney standards) prices, but this one gets the prize. The median value is $325,000, according to domain.com:   http://www.domain.com.au/public/apm/suburbprofile/

Wandering the streets I noticed that despite their houses not being worth a lot, they like to keep them well fenced off from their neighbours. Can't imagine why. The local petrol station too looked rather fortress like, and the local shops are dingy and graffiti strewn.




I chose not to sample Blackett's cafe culture - not that there appeared to be any - but called in at the big Mount Druitt Westfield shopping centre a few km away. I've a feeling it's been renovated since I last went there, and it had a modern, clean and wholesome feel about it. The enormous acreage of outdoor car parks was very full on this weekday morning. I guess the relatively low land values out here mean they haven't yet felt the need to invest in multi-storey above or below ground car parks.

I just did a search on Westfield Mount Druitt, only to find that it seems to be famous for a massive brawl that took place there in 2011! See the Daily Telegraph's report:  http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/police-called-as-gangs-face-off/story-e6freuzi-1225999866185?nk=e5fd78fec7f9f2b84f98bf43d6c122d8

Hornsby - our Tornado Alley?

In January 1991 there was a short, violent storm that swept through the suburb of Hornsby and wreaked havoc. Someone described that event on the radio this morning as a tornado, and given what happened there yesterday, he suggested there was a 'Tornado Alley' operating there.

When I searched the internet for the 1991 event, I found only the violent storm, no mention of the word 'tornado', except that there was in fact a tornado around then in Hornsby, Tennessee, and also one in Hornsby Bend, Texas.

Anyway, let's go with this 'Tornado Alley' idea. Our news media need to compete with the bigger and better tornadoes that just killed several people in the US, and indeed the massive typhoon last week in the Philippines, which killed thousands and made millions homeless, and which is still the real natural disaster story of the moment. 

The local media certainly made hay with our little tornado today. Hornsby was crawling with camera crews this morning as I inspected the damage and the clean-up operations. The reporter/camera operator from the ABC distinguished himself by being particularly territorial towards me  I thought. Clearly jealous of the fine work being done by Sydney Sapiential photographing the damaged cars in the station car park, he rather rudely plonked his camera right in front of mine, and pretended I wasn't there. (ABC, lift your game, you're dealing with the big boys now!)

I'd just passed through Hornsby yesterday, and was on my way down the Pacific Highway to Pymble when a bit before 3pm a there was one of the fiercest downpours I've experienced. Visibility was shocking, and the traffic slowed to a crawl, but there was no hint of any wind. When I first heard the news of the collapsed roof at the Westfield shopping centre movie complex, I assumed it was just due to a drain blockage and water build up. But news trickled in about a swathe of damage - trees down, roofs wrecked, cars upturned or squashed under other cars, and a demountable cabin at the station, turned on its side with six people inside it. 

It turns out there was a 50m wide path of destruction, 2km long, passing through central Hornsby via the shopping centre, the library, the Hornsby Inn, the train station, and the TAFE campus. And it's been officially declared by the Meteorology Bureau to have been a tornado, rather than the 'possible mini-tornado' we were hearing about yesterday.