We’re officially over a week in and have a car, an apartment and a bed. Not much else so far. We’ve been crazy busy setting up.
The car is the most exciting. I got the Peugot 206cc that I was looking for. We looked at new ones in the dealership on Crown Street. “Topless French Beauty” was written on the windshield. Funny. It’s tiny like my old Cabrio but has a hard top. Love it! It is completely weird driving on the other side of the road. I drove like a grandma last night as I had to shift with my left hand (weird!) and I can’t seem to get a handle on the dimensions of the car around me. I’m totally parking like a spaz. Craig got worried when I almost ran the car into a pole in our parking garage. (And of course denied that I had even come close.) Whoops. Also, Sydney is not exactly the easiest city to get to know so we’ve been learning by getting lost or at least turned around. I went for a drive on my own to find groceries on Wednesday night and wound up going through a toll tunnel and ended up near Bondi Junction. Whoops again.
Our new home is pretty cool. We’re in Surry Hills which is much like Davie Street if you know what I mean. Nudge nudge wink wink. (OK - loads of rainbows and pink triangles.) And tons of pubs, delis and cool shops including lots of uber hip design shops including one that sells every type of Marimekko fabric. Yay! Too bad it’ll cost a small fortune to set everything up…but good thing we’re employable and will have incomes soon enough. It is winter here (18 degrees, sunny and clear every day) and they don’t have heating which gets chilly at night. We’ve bought a few space heaters for the different areas of the place. Grand total $75. Worth every penny. And I got little Ugg boots from Target so my feet will be toasty.
We went to IKEA for the ‘big shop’ to get all kinds of small housewares and it was absolutely hellish. First of all, it’s Australia’s biggest IKEA. In their wisdom, IKEA shut down 2 or 3 Sydney stores to open one big giant one out in the burbs. So it’s basically one big store to service a city of 4.5 million people. Never again. It’s a positively demotivating experience: running throught the maze like mice, blaring bad folk music (regular muzac would actually have been preferable) and screaming children everywhere. Oh the humanity.
This is the lineup for the kids play area at IKEA. Truly Hell in a Handbasket.We also went to Coles for a startup grocery shop. We haven’t cooked anything here yet and we have a gas cooktop and all stainless steel stuf so I can’t wait. Only thing is that we don’t really have furniture to sit on once we’ve made a meal so we’ll probably wait until next week to make a decent dinner. This area is completely surrounded by takeaway places – indian, thai, chinese, malaysian, pizza, fish and chips…everything! We moved in and already had 10 menus in our mailbox. We will not starve.
Some things are taking forever. It’ll be at least 2 weeks before we get internet at home. Apparently that’s just how long it takes here. We feel like we have no link to the outside world – it’s been 5 days since we’ve been online and it feels like weeks. So it’s cheap internet cafes for us in the meantime. Blech.
Craig is complaining that we’ve been here for 10 days and haven’t really even seen the ocean as we’re spending all of our time in furniture stores, malls and on errands. We’ll do a little road trip to the northern beaches tomorrow or Sunday to check out where we’ll be spending our free time once it gets warmer.
Lastly, we’re thinking of going to Fiji next week. Here’s how we’re justifying it to ourselves. Apparently they have fewer long weekends here than us. *And* we’ll be working soon enough and won’t have time to get away. *Plus* it’s winter, so we can’t go to the beach here right now. *Furthermore*, Fiji is only $450 to fly to from here and dirt cheap once you get there. Really, it’s a no-brainer
