Random Things From Our First Week

Moving here has been awesome - the city is beautiful, the people are great and we of course have great hosts/guides, Oscar and Jules! I can already tell I am going to love it here. There are definitely differences to the states, but to be honest, so far I generally like the Australian version more.

Chris and I were walking the other day (between apartment inspections) and talking about how it hasn't really felt like that difficult of a transition. I'm guessing that is mainly because it is an english speaking country and we have Oscar and Jules, seriously they are the best. We really have only had one hickup thus far with our bank account getting set-up - we didn't sign in one place so had to go back 2 days later to sign...hopefully we get the cards in the mail today...

Here are a few fun/interesting things from our first week.

1.  Winter in Sydney is way, way better than winter in Chicago - I am currently sitting on Jules and Oscars porch at 3 PM in a tank top soaking up some sun, and the view isn't bad either.

Seriously, this is O & J's view!

2.  People think we have accents. We have gotten comments like, "oh I rather like your accents" or "I thought you had an accent" when we said we were from the states. We don't sound like hicks or valley girls, so I guess we are harder to place....actually a few people have thought I am Canadian, not Chris, just me :)

3.  We have caught ourselves picking up a few new phrases - like "wildly" or "rather like", they just come out. I think wildly might be more of an Oscar phrase than an Aussie phrase.

4.  Everything is expensive, except cell phone plans, those are reasonable and cheaper than the states, but that is the only thing :)  Things are also priced by the week....when its priced by the week, you can't just multiply by 4 to get the monthly cost, there are a sneaky 4 extra weeks in there. Here is what I mean:

• The Crossfit down the street from our apartment is $99 per week, $5,148 per year or monthly cost of $429!!!!!! Yep you read that right, I miss e-town for more than one reason!
• Rent....same story, we are paying under $3,000, which is not crazy and what we expected but, we did pay less in Chicago for way more space.

This is a microwave that cost $890, yep a microwave and yes $890 is not a typo

5.  Sweets are much different and better here! They are not as sweet as in the states, if that make sense at all. At its called lollies, not candy. There is a lemon club soda drink called a lemon squash that is delicious!

6.  Breakfast (brekkie) is also delicious. Avacado, but you call it avo, is on everything, so I obviosuly love it. And the bacon, the bacon is so good, its much different, more meaty than we are used to in the states.

7.  Everything is called a burger, a chicken sandwich, nope its a chicken burger.

8.  People sit in the front of the cab here with the driver. Yesterday I opened the cab drivers door, oops, wrong side!!!

9.  Walking has been more of a challenge for Chris than me, you give way to the left not to the right.

10.  It is beautiful, this morning we did about a 2 hour walk with Jules along the North Shore, so we were weaving in and out of the harbour bays.

11.  Some of the birds sound like dying children, but they are beautiful. I was much more excited about the birds than Chris.

How pretty are these, they are everywhere, you just have to look

12.  We won a meet raffle, twice! Basically at a bar they sell tickets for these awesome meet trays and toward 9ish they have the drawing. We then went to another bar and they stored the meat in their fridge for us :)

Meat tray #1, breakfast with 2 dozen eggs

Meet tray #2, steaks that will be consumed this evening

Next up, sign lease, pay bond (hopefully with our Australian bank account), move into apartment, finish updating my CV and cover letter, look for a job, pick up Bone Crusher from jail, celebrate Jules birthday, buy furniture and send Chris off to his first day of work next week! Jules and Chris did find a job lead for me in the Sunday paper...