Sydney has changed

At the crosswalk, the traffic bustles its way through the street, trying to make its way home. Cyclists, people in wheelchairs, people running madly toward or away from something.

Fun fact: the Slip Inn is where the Prince of Denmark met his now princess.

But life isn't always a fairytale. I'm not sure if it's a post-pandemic perspective, or the fact that my view of my hometown has been frozen in carbonite by nostalgia.

But Sydney has changed a lot. The world has.

In fact, I'm probably the one who has changed the most.

The city, and we as people, are only just beginning to recover. So when I say Sydney has changed, take it with a grain of salt.

We all have a way of looking at places, and at the people in our lives, through rose-coloured glasses. Whether that's fair or not, the life of the city, the culture and the food have always played a big part for me.

All we can do is move forward.

Life is a relentless book. It won't let you re-read previous chapters, and we can't finish the book if we don't keep reading, right?

Is there a place you have locked away in your memory banks?

The Slip Inn

The Slip Inn is a pub in the old Royal George Hotel, a two-storey face brick building in the Federation Free Style. It was built in 1903 and went on the New South Wales State Heritage Register in 1999. Wikipedia's list of Sussex Street buildings dates the Royal George to about 1858 instead, so the sources don't agree on that.

The names on this corner are older than the building. In the 1840s the pub here was the Patent Slip Hotel. It became the New Wharf Hotel in 1882 and the Royal George in 1888. The old Cuthbert's Patent Slip building next door is part of the complex now. A patent slip was a railway for hauling a ship out of the water on a cradle, so it could be repaired.

In the 1950s and 60s the Royal George was a meeting place for the intellectual crowd known as the Sydney Push, and Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes drank there. It lost its licence in 1993 and stood empty until John and Merivale Hemmes bought it in 1996. It reopened as the Slip Inn in late 1997. The bar inside is Mexican-inspired, and a Mexican flag hangs from the balcony on the left of the frame.

The prince and his princess

The prince is Frederik of Denmark. During the 2000 Sydney Olympics he was at the Slip Inn with his brother, Prince Joachim, and his cousin, Prince Nikolaos of Greece and Denmark, among others. Mary Donaldson, who was born in Hobart, was there with friends, and they didn't work out that he was the Crown Prince of Denmark until after they'd met. The pub made the most of it with a campaign called "Meet your prince at the Slip". Frederik and Mary married in Copenhagen Cathedral on 14 May 2004.

When this was posted, Mary was Crown Princess. Queen Margrethe II announced her abdication in her New Year's Eve address on 31 December 2023, and on 14 January 2024 Frederik became King Frederik X, with Mary as his queen. That week the Slip Inn swapped its Mexican theme for Danish flags.

In this frame, two years earlier, a Danish flag already hangs from the balcony on the right.

Sydney in December 2021

Sydney spent much of 2021 shut. The lockdown that began in June ended on 11 October 2021, after about 106 days, and pubs reopened to people who could show they were vaccinated. Some opened at one minute past midnight. Australia's international border had been closed for nearly 600 days when the first quarantine-free flights for fully vaccinated citizens and permanent residents landed in Sydney on 1 November.

On 15 December, the day before this was posted, New South Wales dropped most of the rules that were left. Masks were needed only on public transport, on planes and at airports. Hospitality venues had no capacity caps, and the state no longer required proof of vaccination. The same day, NSW Health reported 1,360 new cases and 110 confirmed cases of the Omicron variant.