To Market To Market: Saturdays at Kings Cross

When I first left home and decided to extend my independence my immediate choice was to live in an area that completely defined "cool", hip and total rebellion: the iconic Kings Cross. Well let's get real. In the first instance it was Elizabeth Bay, but that was before it became the lush posh plush area it is now.

Little did I know that for the next 10 years or so I would end up living in and around this area and loving every minute of it. 2011 is SUCH an accommodating post code.

Way back in those day, Fitzroy Gardens (which at the time, being completely oblivious to anything other than my social scene, little did I realise that it even had a name!) was merely a short-cut to and from home.

It was place that if you were lucky and some cool band was in town and staying at The Sebel, you might get a quick glance from them if you happened to accidentally on purpose walk directly in their path on the way to wherever. But I digress.

Sure, there was the occasional Food & Wine Festival, which naturally I attended and thoroughly enjoyed to be gauged by the level of hang-over the following day (or days in some instances) but that was about it.

It was a dirty, smelly short cut and honestly nothing to get too excited about.

I had stopped going to Paddo markets, basically because it lost what was its genous. It's laid back, whatever happens happens type scene and suddenly gone incredibly up-market to the point that at times you felt that you simply didn't fit in if you weren't a size 0, weren't wearing pearls and didn't have your Prada on.

Being the proud square-peg I had absolutely NO intention of fitting in simply to be accepted, so I went on my merry way and found other means to amuse myself on a Saturday afternoon.

Fast-forward 10 years and a post-code later, I felt it was time to revisit my old home-ground and what I stumbled across was the singularly most earth-moving Oh-my-God moment of that day.

Markets? Since when were there markets here? Where on earth had that stinky old short-cut park gone? Ohhhhhh....it's still here, but it's not a stinky old garden it's an amazing piece of paradise, which evoked such memory recall of me loving to roam the back streets of Darlo and Paddo just to see the architecture and hearing all the jazz emitting from various homes, I simply found myself instantly drawn in to its being.

I LOVE being a tourist in my own city!

So with a little bit of trepidation I took the first step in to what has now become one of my favourite Saturday destinations. A little bit of street food, a little bit of home baking, a lotta flowers sold by Pat (now if you haven't met Pat before, she is an institution. A diamond in the rough. You either love her or hate her. Took me a while (dang where did that young carefree confidence disappear to!) but gotta love her. She says it how it is and it's not often you see that these days with everyone determined to be sheep and being so overly PC.

I have over time made some firm friends, one of whom recently relocated back to his home town in Adelaide and there is not a Saturday that goes by that I don't miss our chats, where we would scurry off, find a spot, share a million stories and have a running commentary on the fashion being worn on any given day. Kings Cross Fashion Police we were!