Today was an adventure inspired by a couch. Our lack of a couch. Our really really sad uncomfortable lack of a couch. Let’s just say that a week spent sitting on a deflating air mattress writing blog posts and editing pictures and replying to emails will make you determined to acquire a couch. I’m not saying this is the biggest problem I’ve ever had, or that you should actually be sympathetic, but a couch is the last item we need to really make this place our home, and thus this story revolves around a couch.

I found Ben a standing desk on Gumtree (Oz’s rather nice equivalent to craigslist). We scored a tv/media cabinet from the side of the road. We found a real fridge (with freezer!) on Gumtree. We bought a legitimate real-person bed. Our landlords are loaning us a tiny old 13-inch tv with bunny ears. We hauled some $10 Gumtree bedside tables on the bus to put in our bathroom. IKEA kitchen stand and tall desk chair have both been situated in the kitchen and office. All that’s left? Couch!

The couch we found on Gumtree, the couch of our dreams ($100, comfy looking), is located in Mosman, a tiny little community on the top of some very tall hills on the other side of some very large rivers.

When one is traveling over an hour on trains, buses, and boats to see a couch, why not make a day of it? And so we did.

The opera house stands across the river from our old friend Luna Park. Still creepy in daylight! In a good way.

First observation? The opera house is WAY cooler in person than in giant zoomed out landscape photos. Sure, it’s a neat shape in tourist pictures, but a far off shot gives you no sense of scale or how it’s constructed.

The roofing is a mix of different types of ceramic tiles, which gives the roof its characteristic shimmer.

The way the building looks, sprouting out of the ground into massively tall sweeping points is the coolest bit, though.

YAWN

I guess I prefer perspective.

 In the Circular Quay (pronounced “key”, I did not know that) area where the opera house is located, someone owns this:

I wanted to take a picture with Ben posing all gangsta next to it, but he said whomever owned it was obviously actually gangsta, and would shoot us. I said, anyone who owns a mini can’t be gangsta. He said, IT’S A BLING CAR. I said, it has a handicap sticker. He said, all the more evidence! He’s been in a shoot-out! I rest my case with, “It’s a mini.”

In other news, ferry rides are pretty.

I can’t wait to more fully explore this coast line.

When we eventually did find our way to the residence of the perfect-couch, it was indeed perfect, and the people selling it were perfectly nice. We’ve looked into hiring a guy and a truck to help us move it sometime this week. However, they are moving on Saturday, themselves, so we told them what we were planning, but that we’d rather they have the money rather than a truck-guy, if they were interested. So! We’re giving them $100 to deliver it, which is more than we were planning on paying for a truck-guy, but brings our total investment to about what we were assuming we’d pay to /buy/ a couch in the first place. Win-win. I am anxiously awaiting Friday. I think we’ll watch a movie on the computer with some wine on our new couch.

We rushed to catch the ferry back to Circular Quay, and man, we were both tired and ready to be home, but Sydney at night is gorgeous. Taking long exposures from a moving boat isn’t the best way to get beautiful shots, but I don’t care. Look anyway!

Impressionist:

Realism:

It was a good day.