Ashfield sights (and Shanghai nights)

I lived in Ashfield for a couple of years when I first arrived in Sydney in 1998. It was well on the way to being one of Sydney's premier Chinatowns then, and I liked it a lot.

I headed back the other day to check the place over and see what's changed lately, and as the Sydney Morning Herald reported recently, it's gone further down that road, and especially down the road of a Shanghai food and culture Chinatown. There seemed to be lots of 'Shanghai', 'New Shanghai', 'Shanghai Night', and 'New Shanghai Night' restaurants, and I suspect they're all excellent. See http://www.smh.com.au/national/business-booms-as-old-ashfield-becomes-new-shanghai-20110617-1g7vg.html

There's also a monument to Mei Quong Tart, the 'Ashfield Mandarin' of more than a century ago, and there's a Chinese temple there too.

I checked out the Ashfield Mall shopping centre too, and was pleased to see it's looking up again, with a smartly renovated food court, and a new Aldi supermarket to complement the Coles and Woolworths ones there.
The new civic centre looks OK too. It's funny, but I remember going to a big rowdy mass meeting once, presented by Ashfield Council, where they told us that private developers had promised to provide us with a renovated shopping centre and council chambers, but the only way we could have them was if we agreed to let the developers build 30 storey tower blocks on top of it all. Well, guess what? No sign of any tower blocks. The Council must have called their bluff after all.

One thing hasn't changed though. There are still a lot of big, noisy airliners passing overhead on their way up after take off from Sydney Airport. The last few before the 11pm curfew tended to be the fully fuelled, heavily loaded ones heading for distant Asian destinations. They probably still are.