Follow the White Brick Homes: Merrylands

If I spend too long away from Western Sydney, I worry that folks will start calling me a sell out. So here's

Merrylands

Per my usual tactics, a forty minute train ride from Central transported me to Merrylands Train Station.

There isn't much you can say about Merrylands station that you can't say about most on the network - shops on one side,

apartments on the other.

It was the shopping side immediately west of the station that I headed to first.

Merrylands' commercial centre is actually a real Middle Eastern hub. As a result, there are all kinds of goodies.

Restaurants and kebab shops are the most obvious offering,

with the sights (and enchanting smells) of Middle-Eastern bakeries being a common sight too,

as well as grocery stores.

Merrylands also appears to be a solid suburb for party catering, with a butcher offering goats,

and a patisserie advertising their terrifying handywork.

I actually had a lot of fun walking through commercial Merrylands. Where else can you find the world's proudest barber,

and a massive Persian rug store?

I had a big day of suburbsing ahead of me, so it seemed smart to stop for lunch before continuing. When in an interesting suburb, I try to eat something I've never had before, so this place offering up Persian sandwiches seemed the go.

Ten dollars bought me item number one on the menu, something called a "bandari".

This subway-on-steroids sandwich was amazing, with slices of some sort of Persian sausage, lettuce, tomato and pickles on some soft sesame seed bread.

After eating as much as I could of my offensively large sub, I continued on my way, leaving Merrylands' commercial hub and heading down the creatively named Merrylands Road, through apartments, car fumes and abandoned shopping trolleys.

This led me into residential Merrylands.

Residential Merrylands is a funny place.

You can either live in an absolute unit of a house with a questionably high number of pillars,

or you can pick something decidedly more modest.

I used this park of sorts to move from one street to another, which had the strangest collection of misuse I've ever seen.

Firstly, this discarded jar of Thai muscle relief cream,

a smashed VB bottle,

and some abandoned long-grain rice,

below a piece of public furniture which has at some stage in the past been unsuccessfully set alight. Ah, Western Sydney.

As I continued along suburban Merrylands,

the homes got even more outrageous.

Following the catalogue of Scarface mansions took me back onto the main road, near the suburb's western border.

Before I left, I did spot this interesting church,