We’ve lathered up with sunscreen twice today!

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First World Southern Hemisphere Problems: the goddamn buses here don’t announce or post or otherwise give any indication of where along the route you are at any time. Even the buses equipped with nice little LED screens don’t USE them! This has probably been the most confusion-causing thing so far. Well, that combined with the fact that over 50% of intersections in some areas have no street signs. The two together make navigation rather frustrating.

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I’m currently sitting on a bus writing as we are on our way to visit a bank to open accounts, check at a realtor’s office to see if renting through an agency will be as difficult as I anticipate, and then visit a so-called “granny flat” being rented out by the owner.

We spent the morning today continuing our online housing search. After a distinct lack of success finding anything suitable using normal-to-me search terms, I settled on searching for granny flats, where are essentially little guest houses in the back of someone’s property. They tend to have their own bathing facilities, kitchens, and sometimes even laundry while sharing a yard with the main house.

The granny flat (! it will be a while till I get over the name) we’re looking at tonight is a block away from the Parramatta River, an extension of the bay, and would be a 30 minute bike ride to my hypothetical work place, assuming they ever create the position for me.

(OOOH, our bus just got stuck in traffic next to the Sir Tommy Thai thai restaurant. yum!)

I don’t yet know if the fact that neither of us currently has a job will make finding a place to live nearly impossible. We’ve taken screenshots of our bank accounts to try and prove that we ARE financially stable despite our employment status, but they are not Australian bank accounts, and I do not know whether we will even be given the chance to argue our case should employment status come up.

We have an appointment to look at another place tomorrow evening. The flat tonight has our #2 rating in our complicated “housing desirability rating scale”, and the flat tomorrow is our #1 choice. Wouldn’t it be nice if one of them worked out? Oh, pleasepleasepleaseplease!

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We are now currently sitting on a retaining wall on the river, watching the sun set and large boats go by. We opened the bank account, talked to the realtor, and walked by the house we’re going to look at later because I wanted to see it in the daylight, and now we have a couple of hours to kill. Neither of us is hungry yet (later maybe, Thai?!?!?), so writing on the water it is.

We have a jug of orange juice that was on sale for a dollar because it expires in two days. Score! We will have to shop carefully for these kinds of deals in the future. Perhaps it will lead us down interesting culinary roads.

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Earlier this morning, after finishing internet housing searching and calling renters to make appointments, we took Viive’s two dogs, Duke and Brandy, for a walk that ended up being two hours long. Duke is a year older than Brandy, but Brandy is completely dominant. And Duke is completely harassed. It was hilarious walking them because the lead they use is one leash with two little ends that go out to harnesses, so the dogs can be at most about four feet apart. I’ll let you guess whether they ever want to go in the same direction, or even move/be still at the same time. They ended up completely exhausted by the walk, and I’m pretty convinced it’s because they were pulling against each other and us the entire time.

Do you see their leashes? Do you see? Duke and Brandy do NOT agree.

We made our way to a park near their house which has paths extending for kilometers through various nature areas. We saw dozens of bright green, red, yellow, blue, etc, birds, and I finally saw the bird that makes the lovely metallic sounding call!

Ok, so the picture sucks, but I’m gonna pat my little HTC on the head for managing to capture it at all: 

Later on as we were heading back home I found an interesting bug house hanging from a tree. It’s a cylinder made out of about fifteen tiny twigs somehow cemented together, hanging by one end off of a tree trunk. The other end is an open hole with some sort of silk inside.

I couldn’t figure out if it was empty or not, but boy do I want to find out what made it, so I yanked it off the tree and stuck it in a poop bag for later investigation. It’s now sitting on my bedside table in a tupperware. Exciting! I will investigate it later.

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Back to the present: we visited the granny flat in the lovely area by the river and, well, no. It’s broken into two rooms, the kitchen and then the bedroom/living area. The owner took really good pictures of the place to post online, for in the ad it looks as though there is actually some natural light. Maybe they brought some floodlights in for hire and placed them outside the tiny kitchen window to get that effect. Also? It’s pink. I thought that would be ok, with a nice setup and good light. Not so much with the cracked walls and cotton-ball smell.

And, um. The bathroom didn’t have a door. And thus was in the same room as the kitchen. No.

Better luck tomorrow?