Shuffling around

This evening Mark and I are getting packed up as we leave the Glebe house tomorrow for another temporary home. At least we will soon have a more permanent home! As I mentioned a couple of posts back, we had our application accepted on the house in Meadowbank and put down a deposit on it last Saturday! Until we can move in on September 3rd, we will be in the Medina Executive Apartments. It looks pretty nice and is being paid for by Macquarie University out of Mark's relocation allowance. The downside is that it's in North Ryde (near Macquarie University), a dull suburban sprawl connected to the city only via a 40 minute bus ride. But, there are gym, sauna and swimming pool facilities, so hopefully I will be too busy getting wet to notice the surroundings too much.

Today Mark took the morning off work and we strolled around Glebe and Newtown, until it was time for a seminar he wanted to attend at the University of Sydney. We also had another poke around in Gould's Book Arcade on King Street, the most brilliant warehouse piled full of second hand books, where I acquired Nylon magazine and Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. That makes the second Nabokov novel I have bought in a week (the first being The Defence, found for $3 on a stall at Glebe Market) - the lesser known ones that I found hard to get hold of in the UK just keep appearing!

Here's a few pictures from around Glebe/Newtown:


View of the Central Business District.




On King Street, Newtown.


Mark in a cafe reading Nylon.

Glebe house

I realised I never posted a picture of where we are staying at the moment! Here is the house, in Glebe, just off Glebe Point Road. It is a shared house, we have our own room but are sharing kitchen, dining room, garden, and 3 bathrooms with the others. There are a few interesting people here - Singaporeans, Canadians, other Britishers.... The Singaporeans make amazing homemade tea which they let me try. Lovely!



So we have been here just over three weeks now. We leave next Thursday (31st July).

Rain booo.

Feeling a bit ill today, got a cold coming I think. The weather is awful at the moment which doesn't help; it has poured with rain pretty much solidly since yesterday evening. This means I am stuck inside the house, as neither of the three pairs of shoes (well...two pairs of actual shoes and one pair of flip flops) I brought with me in my suitcase are very rain-appropriate. I wore my canvas shoes to just walk a hundred meters down to the Fair Trade Café on Glebe Point Road last night and they almost died, so I am having to give them a day off today.

I also need more clothes! I am so fed up of the same hoodie-jeans-jacket everyday. I think American Apparel is due to open their Sydney store soon though, possibly even today, so I need to get down there and pick up a new hoodie, especially since the $$$ price works out slightly cheaper than the £££ price.



I may end up with this one in brown. I kind of favour the hoodie dress that they do (they same thing just longer like a dress), but it doesn't come in brown and I am kind of attracted to this brown. Ho hum we'll see.



I like this cardigan as well, it's a unisex one but looks a good fit, and I'm always borrowing Mark's cardigans because I like how they fit so it would be good to get my own and I'm sure he would appreciate it!

Mark just skyped me with some good news!!! We got our application accepted on the house in Meadowbank!!! I'm so excited! It is still a month until we can move in, but it's so good to know there is some stability coming. We move out of this house in Glebe next Thursday, and Macquarie University (Mark's work) are hopefully sorting us out something for the intervening weeks.

In other news, I forgot to write that I passed my Graduate Diploma in Law, and not only passed but got a Commendation, hurrah! So there are two things to celebrate right now. Although they will possibly be celebrated by hiding in bed from the weather...

England's green and pleasant land

I miss England today. There are a lot of things about Sydney that make it seem very familiar, but also a lot of things that make it feel very foreign. Especially the way the buildings look, and the wide wide wide roads.

These photos were taken on Mark's parents' farm in Broughton, Cambridgeshire, just before we left on our way to Australia. I miss the peaceful English countryside, that's where I want to be right now.

Thai thai thai weekend.

This evening we had a lovely meal at Thai-riffic on King Street in Newtown, with the University of Sydney people. It was pretty good - Mark and I shared a Pad Thai as we were warned the meals were huge, and the warnings were right! It was delicious though - a much nicer Pad Thai than what I am used to, and they put the peanut at the side of the plate which I like. I am not very fond of the peanut part of Pad Thai so it was good to get the option of whether to add it to the dish or not.

On Saturday we had a lovely day at Glebe Market, followed by rosehip tea at Badde Manors on Glebe Point Road. On Sunday we had a really good red curry at the Fair Trade Café just a few doors down from Badde Manors. I like that café, it has a very relaxed bohemian feel.

Apologies for the lack of interesting photos here and at Flickr recently. I will get back on track soon I promise!

Possible home

On Sunday we caught the ferry out to Meadowbank to look at Mianna's (Mark's colleague) house. She is moving out and we have the possibility of taking over the lease. It was a grey, overcast, chilly day but you still got a great view of the harbour. It would be an amazing trip to take in the summer.

The house is really nice! It's a bungalow (as are most suburban houses) built in 1914 with a good amount of space and really lovely period features.



That's the living room, it's so cosy and I love the fireplace and windows. Mianna and her partner have a 6 year old daughter and that's her little dinner table in the middle! (The wine glasses are obviously ours!)

Meadowbank is a very quiet suburban area with a couple of local shops and a park, and a supermarket in the next suburb. The house is 3 minutes walk from the station to get into the city in 25 minutes. We are having a big think but we are very keen on it!

Trumpets and bookmarks

Today we investigated suburbs, and walked all the way from Concord West to Summer Hill. At which point I became not active any more and we got the train back in to the city.

I think maybe we will end up living in Strathfield or thereabouts. It is usefully located and is a "prestigious suburb" according to pretty much everything written about Sydney. I actually didn't like it so much but Mark did and to be honest it felt safe and leafy and had pretty good shops and is very well connected to both Macquarie Uni and the city.

Anyway, I thought I would remind you all of the ways you can keep track of me:

- This blog. I will try to update as often as the fancy takes me. Hopefully at least once a week.
- My Flickr. All my photos will go on here as and when I have some. Perhaps everyday, perhaps once a week. If there are new photos uploaded worth mentioning, I will mention them here.
- My Twitter. Usually I update this once every day or so. As you can see, my latest Twitter tweets appear in the navigation sidebar of this blog (look to the right!). If you think you've missed some, click "follow me on Twitter" to go to my Twitter.

Now I am off to enjoy my new heater and hot water bottle and Batman on tv!

Glebe Point Diner

Just got in from a meal at Glebe Point Diner, to celebrate the end of our first full week in Sydney!

It was really amazing, and such good value considering what you would pay for a similar standard in the UK. We started with trout (Mark) and crab (me). I got to use the crab pokey stick for the first time! You know when they give you the crab legs and you get a little skewer to poke in to get at the meat? I was a little lost at first, but soon got the hang of it. It was delicious. Main course was even better - we both had ruby mullet with mussels on a potato bed, with some kale on top.

I'm not usually a pudding person and rarely have desert in restaurants, but we decided to go for it and I must say it was possibly my favourite course of the three. We shared a chocolate mousse and a strawberry trifle and both were delicious.

The waiting staff were wonderfully friendly, and the guy even brought out a leaf of kale on a plate to show the table next to ours when they asked what cale was! Haha, I only know what kale is because that was the guinea pig's favourite food.

With a decent bottle of wine the bill came to just over $160. Not bad at all for the standard of food and service, and definitely somewhere we will be going back to.

Getting lost and finding home.

Today was spent walking from Glebe into the City, to the National Australia Bank on Liverpool Street. Although we have our card and PINs, our cheque books won't arrive until next week, so I needed to get a counter cheque in case we needed to put down a deposit on a flat in the meantime. Which reminds me, they call them "units", not "flats". Which sounds a bit clinical.

On the way back, I turned the wrong way and ended up getting lost at Darling Harbour. Forever. Seriously, once you are in, there is no way out! It's kind of a pleasant place to get lost though, as you can see. I eventually escaped up a dingy looking staircase and found myself back up on Market Street. Then I walked all the way down George Street and Broadway to get back on to Glebe Point Road. This is decidedly NOT the quickest route, so next time I will look at walking via Ultimo. Or get the bus, but since I have a lot of time for walking right now it seems sensible to save the $1.80 bus fare.

Tomorrow night we have a reservation at the Glebe Point Diner, to celebrate the end of our first full week in Sydney! We won't be celebrating too hard however, as we are going to view a lot of flats...units sorry.....on Saturday morning, in Drummoyne and then maybe Summer Hill. I also want to look in Strathfield and Burwood as those would be good areas from the point of view of both of us getting to work easily, and it seems cheap to rent there. There is also a possibility of us taking over one of Mark's colleague's leases in Meadowbank on the North Shore, as she has bought a house and is keen to move in, but her lease is still running until October.

Anyhow, we shall see.

Finding feet.

Mark has started work at Macquarie Uni so for the past couple of days I have been sorting bits and bobs and also taking trips to the supermarket here in Glebe. It's called Coles and it's in this big shopping centre place called Broadway down the street.

It is slightly alarming how expensive some things are. All the chocolate bars are $1.80, which at the current exchange rate is about 90p. When you are used to 33p Crunchie bars from the Nottingham University union shop, this seems a bit extreme! SO I guess I am off chocolate for a while. There are cheap cookies however, which makes up for it a little. And cheap tofu and also cheap SUSHI which pretty much makes life worth living.

Milk is also pricy, but the worst thing is shampoo! It's like double the price! But I had to buy some anyway, and after a week of washing my hair in rubbish gunk nicked out of hotel bathrooms, it is such a relief to have a clean, pretty-smelling head again.

I just watched the weather, and everyone was going crazy about the fact that it is going to be "only" 14 degrees C for the next couple of days. "It's going to be COLD COLD COLD" apparently.

I love that I am in a country where 14 degrees in winter is considered especially cold.

Arrived!

Well I made it to Sydney, arriving last Wednesday. I also had a fun two days in Singapore on the way. I don't have a lot of blogging time at the moment, but I will try to make up for it when we are more settled! Here is the first picture i took in Sydney, and I will try to post about that and Singapore soon!