just cross the Harbour Bridge. Today was a gloomy, cloudy, rainy day. I had planned on spending a day in the Blue Mountains, about an hour outside of the city, but woke up too late. That and the fact that it was raining made me switch to Plan B: Improvise.

This meant walking around the city some more, ducking out of the rain into the fantastic Queen Victoria Building (or QVB). A four-leveled structure opened in 1898, it looks like CLE’s renovated Arcade but about 3 times the length. I was in a similar building yesterday called The Strand (built in 1891), only not as big.  Seems like the 1890s were high times for these enclosed shopping areas built in the Romanesque style, not only in our humble little burg but all over the world.