To Enmore for lunch

It was fine out so I planned a longer walk than normal but my route took me down to Darling Harbour as usual. Outside the Pyrmont Bridge Hotel at the traffic lights a glossy dark pigeon walked between my feet to peck at something on the pavement. Later, near UTS where the construction hoarding is installed, a woman came up to me and touched me on the arm, asking if I could help her. "What's wrong?" I asked. "Oh don't ask," she said, rolling here eyes and turning down the corners of her mouth, before requesting two dollars from me. I was so surprised by her neat appearance and the incongruence contained in the question that I took out my wallet and gave her five dollars. She thanked me profusely as I started back down the hill toward Wattle Street.

When I got to Newtown there was a young man walking down the pavement with a young woman beside him. He wore white sneakers with high ankles and carried a pair of black leather shoes in his right hand. I thought about eating lunch in the Taiwanese vegan place up near Moore Theological College but decided to wait until I got to Enmore, which had been my intended destination. Once there I looked at some restaurant menus posted up in windows. I was walking along when I turned back and entered a place on Enmore Road named Cairo. I ate a huge meal of delicious Egyptian food and had a bottle of beer brewed in Brookvale, a suburb in northern Sydney.

After eating I complimented the staffer behind the front counter and headed back up toward Newtown. I saw a police van, a police car and two ambulances parked in King Street outside the railway station. The police car and one of the ambulances had their lights flashing. As I walked past on the other side of the road I saw two ambos wheel someone up to the front ambulance on a stretcher.

A young woman with short green hair and leotards printed with upside-down Christian crosses lit up a cigarette in the square. I headed back up the road. As I passed St Paul's College I had a look at the development approval certificate posted on the font fence. It said they were building more accommodation on the site. As I passed the driveway leading to the worksite, a woman dessed in fluoro gear was holding up a truck with her outstretched hand, and let me pass by on the footpath.

In Victoria Park I asked a workman standing near a crane what they were doing to the pond and he said he didn't know. "Just fixing it up." I continued down toward Broadway. Stopped at the traffic lights on City Road was a large removalist's truck with DAJIN written on the side along with the Chinese characters for "big money". I walked back along Broadway, retracing my steps, and turned into Quay Street. In Darling Harbour the sun was in my eyes except when I passed under the Western Distributor. The sun reflected off the water played on the underside of the concrete motorway.

I stopped at the pharmacist to pick up some medicine I had ordered the day before. Outside the shop in the mall near the entrance to the supermarket a slim man with white hair wearing a suit was typing on his smartphone with two thumbs; the device had a bright orange case. I stopped at a Vietnamese restaurant on Harris Street and bought a flat white before returning home. I had been gone for just over three hours.