I’ve finally heard from my hopeful-potential-new-boss!!!!!
I just did a stationary happy dance that quite excited the dogs from a dead sleep and caused them to come and roll over on their backs to receive celebratory scratches.
Ben and I cheers-ed with some australian beers we picked up today during a dog adventure and I’m still all giddy. Hooooooorrrraaaaay!
I’m going to meet with my hopeful-new-lab next week and get introductions. I feel SO MUCH better about our financial security, and now I feel much less guilty about buying those three beers at the store today :)
PS: like everything else, it seems, beer is much more expensive here. Not quite twice as expensive, and I will be earning nearly twice as much as I did before, so there!
Ben emailed the landlords from the granny flat last night, basically saying “It was great to meet you, etc, we have scheduled a few more viewings that we’d like to follow through on, but we loved your place, and we’d really appreciate it if you could let us know if there are any other people who are planning to take the lease.”
And they emailed back with, “Likewise, it was great to meet you and Adrienne. We just wanted to let you know you are at the top of our list in terms of people interested in the flat. Continue to view all the properties on your list and we also have to show a couple more people through, but B and I would be very happy if you were able to take it.”
Hooray! I can’t wait for Friday night.
…
Still, we set off to see a neat looking apartment that we just found today listed on a realtor’s site. While we were waiting at the bus stop we went to the website (on our future data devices!) to check the time of the showing, but the showing today was gone. So we called the realtor, who said the showing was cancelled last minute, sorry. Oh well!
It was a short walk, and not a bad spot to hang out for a bit, as far as bus stops go :)
This will be a mundane post. Few observations, but many facts!
Oof. Today was a major oof day, but it ended on a positive note. It started on a positive note as well, I suppose, there was just an unfortunate middle bit that included lots of running, garbled phone calls, crappy communication (with a renter), and a shouting match between Ben and me. That only lasted a minute, but still. There was some serious frustration mixed in there.
At the mall, Mrs. Fields Brings you: Toastie Tastes of the World!!”
In case you couldn’t read that… here’s a closeup:
I think I’ll have… a Greek! No… an Italian! Actually, *pretty much anything* other than Australian.
Breakfast was lovely, we did some housing research and banking shenanigans, and took the dogs for another adventure walk (I’m going to stick pictures from the walk throughout this post because that’s most of what was interesting about today). Then we bused our way to a new mall to get groceries, when a housing contact called and said we could see a granny flat today. He said he’d text the address. We’d also been planning on seeing another place at 8 in a nearby suburb, so we booked it through the store, ran home, changed clothes (must look fancy for potential landlords. or solvent, at least), and booked it out again to catch another bus-then-train.
Duke looks on in confusion, but I’m all, “woooooo! buckin’ koala!”
And then crappy crap-storm started where the spur-of-the-moment renter didn’t text the address, so I called to request the address, he was somewhere rather noisy, I couldn’t hear the address, but I thought I heard the address, so we speed-walked to the wrong place, called, explained, found real address, ran to new address (long way off), saw address, saw renter, determined renter was full of shit and had been texting wrong number, or rather, several wrong numbers, bitch, were depressed by flat (broken, smoky, ad said no smoke, wtf), and at that point were miles (ok, but more than a kilometer, anyway) from the place we were really interested in seeing. See: brief shouting match over hypothetical destination of a bus that didn’t come. Frustration, anyone?
But, there was a happy ending! We did catch a bus to the correct place, then a train to the correct place, and managed to make it to the flat we wanted to see on time, and it was amazing!
I think of Australia as dry. Sydney *feels* dry. But there are snails! In trees!
It’s at the top of our price range, and unfurnished, but it’s in an optimal location for my please-please-actually-come-through research job. And the renters who own the property were fantastically nice. And it has TWO rooms, one for a bedroom, one for an office, plus a kitchen, a bathroom (with door!), and huge beautiful windows to let in lots of Oz sunlight. It’s dreamy, really.
We have another place, this time not a granny flat, that we’re excited to see on Friday, but we’ve both agreed that we’ll probably decide between the two at that point, and forgo further searching. The Friday flat is cheaper and fully furnished with a fridge and a TV, looks lovely and modern, and has a balcony. However, it’s only one room and is much further away from my please-job in a sketchier location. It’s going to be hard to decide. If the pictures lie and it’s really a dump, that will make it easy, I suppose. I just really hope that the granny flat from tonight doesn’t get rented out from under us. I secretly already have my heart set on it, can you tell?
The positive from all of this is that we saw several terrible places before finding one that is awesome, so we recognize awesome and appreciate awesome when we see awesome.
We celebrated with a pizza and some juice on the train ride home, and now we can fall into bed after a hot shower happy and satisfied.
Tomorrow: a full day of research: taxes, banking, health insurance, and of course some housing search (there could always be another super awesome flat that appears, I suppose). And, obviously, an adventure dog walk.
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.
…
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!
…
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.
…
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.
…
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.
But, did you know you can make steel cut oats in a rice cooker overnight? Duh, I guess, but it was a revelation to me. A good rice cooker will be one of our first acquisitions once we have a place to live.
With no time to waste (as Ben convinced me – I rather wanted to go to the aquarium), we set off to be wildly productive.
After some breakfast and research online, we caught a bus (off of Jambaroo street. Yup.) to a train station where we acquired the 28 day transit passes my mom gifted us with for our adventure.
This is seriously one of the best things I’ve ever owned.
From there we walked, got lost (there will be a theme here), walked more, and found the Town Shopping Center we were looking for. Town Shopping Center is apparently code for Biggest Mall You’ve Ever Seen. That’s not true, actually. There was a bigger one in Kyoto, but still.
Our goal here was to wander, get a sense for how things work, find food, open a bank account, and find phone service. We may not have gotten a full sense of “how things work” around here, but we did find food (hooRAY close proximity to asian countries! hooRAY delicious stir fry!), open a bank account (hoo….ray? Getting money into it is going to be interesting), and phone service (hooRAY moms to think ahead and buy internationally compatible phones for birthdays! Ben is using his old iPhone 3GS). For not an inordinate amount of money a month I have a decent number of minutes, free voicemail, and most useful, infinite calls and texts between our two phones because they use the same service. (hooRAY) Actually, most useful is the 200MB of data I get to use. Welcome to five years ago, Adrienne! I’ve been putting this moment off because I suspected once I had a data plan I’d never be able to go back. I think I was right.
Now for the oh god moments. Cheerios are $8/box. Bananas are $3/kg. Computer monitors, TVs, and McDonalds hamburgers are all about 1.5 times the US price. I’m envisioning a lot of lentils and rice (in our future rice cooker!) around here. But in between those home cooked meals out of cheap staples I envision lots and lots of exquisite thai on those occasions that we decide to splurge.
Speaking of bananas, does anyone know what red tipped eco bananas are? The tips appeared to be dipped in wax – are they a no-pesticide banana, and the wax tips help protect against pests? If so, I’d expect them to have been dipped early on in their growth, in which case the wax would be cracked and warped… why do you dip your bananas in red wax, Australia??
The real oh god moments arise around housing, however. I looked for housing a bit before leaving the US, but I managed to miss the fact that most of the prices I was seeing were for shared residences. I’m afraid Ben is about all the roommate I want to handle, and I think he feels the same way about me. We’re probably going to end up paying out the wazoo for a small studio of some sort, but at least we’ll only have our own dishes to deal with. Our lifestyle is going to be different here, but the hope is that our location, in a big vibrant city on the other side of the world with close proximity to fascinating countries (and good asian food!) will make up for the things we have to give up. Like nuts and dried fruit :( It’s going to take a little while to adjust to this as a place where we LIVE, where we need to think about every purchase, and not a place where we’re on vacation, out to experience as much as possible in every moment.
On another note, malls here are interesting, and now that I think about malls I saw in Japan, I think maybe the malls in the US are the odd ones out. Malls here (and in Japan) seem to be more like whole-life-centers, with clothing stores and a food court like you might see in the US, with the addition of dollar stores, tiny pastry shops, strange little stores with merchandise that looks like it fell off the back of a truck, small tech stores, and lots of little groceries. There is more for me there than in US malls, at least.
So along with obtaining our transit cards and figuring out phone service, we picked up some information on health insurance, since as non-Ozzians we don’t get to participate in the national health care that’s available.
Oh. We also picked up some sun screen, since that nasty hole in the ozone is located uncomfortably close, and Oz has the highest rate of skin cancer in the world.
On the way home we got lost after evacuating the bus at the wrong stop, but it is the future now! Data phone future device to the rescue! Ok, it may have taken two backtracks to get it right, but the phone did eventually get us home. During our journey we passed two trees that had craggy bark and looked, for lack of a better word, badly burned. Huh.
They were also covered in tangled spiderwebs with funneled houses for the spider to hide in. Don’t worry, they’re not Sydney Funnelwebs (one of the many deadly things we’ve been warned about by Americans. When we mentioned this to locals they were all, “really? we’re still here, aren’t we? I’m not sure I’ve even ever seen one”), but rather the common black house spider, Badumna insignia. They don’t tend to live in houses, but around them, under eaves and in fences, and in craggy tree bark. I played with a twig in the web for a bit to try and lure the spider out, and managed to get it to hunt the stick and try to kill it, just long enough to get a good look at it. It is a big spider, hairy, but fairly timid, and it’s unknown how dangerous its venom is (i.e. not very). Quite neat though!
female hiding in funnel, loathe to show herself
The female had a plump, spherical abdomen, but none of the pictures of her outside of her retreat were anything but terrible. The spiders themselves are over an inch in length, and somewhat furry!
more adventurous male out investigating
Note the burned-looking bark in the pictures. What causes it? Some of the trees had rubbery sap accumulations. We thought at first that perhaps locals identified these trees as harboring large numbers of dangerous spiders, ooooh!, and burned them to get rid of the pests. But as we walked around more, we saw trees like this all over the place, in the bush, in public parks, in people’s yards. It seems much more likely that this is just what those types of trees look like (I haven’t identified them yet).
…
Viive and her family all get together for dinner on Monday nights, which is a lovely habit. She and Ian have two sons, one of which is married and has a new puppy cocker spaniel. Dinner was tasty if a bit rushed. Maybe it’s just their family, but we’ve eaten with them twice now and every member seems to race to finish their food. Ben and I were consistently eating long after the rest of them. I wonder if it’s an Oz thing? In any case, I got to cuddle the puppy for a good half hour after dinner, which made for a Good Night.
first glimpse of Australian dawn; southern hemisphere stars
Our flight arrived at 6:30 in the morning, Sydney time. I believe that’s around 4:30 in the afternoon back home. I slept a fair amount, I suppose. Ben slept very little. He kept saying his butt hurt. I can’t blame him, really, after 20-some hours sitting.
first glimpse of land
We arrived, deplaned, evacuated orifices, passed immigration, picked up luggage, changed money, and met Viive and Ian at the airport. Viive was waving a UM football seat cushion around to catch our attention.
It turns out that Sept 2 is father’s day in Australia. Happy father’s day! Viive and Ian had big family plans for the afternoon, so after showering, dumping our bags, and settling in a little (Ian made me a latte. Apparently Ozzies are coffee snobs, by their own admission. yum), Ben and I got dropped off at a kind of daycare while they did family stuff. Where the daycare was The Coolest Daycare Ever (™), otherwise known as the Featherdale Wildlife Park.
We pet wallabies, a koala, an echidna, emus, kangaroos, and wombats! I even accidentally fondled a wallaby’s testicles! What did YOU do today?
If you’re curious as to how you accidentally fondle a wallaby’s testicles, you pet a friendly wallaby all over, feeling its ribs and its paws and its tummy fur when you notice something on its stomach, which you then touch because the wallaby is letting you pet it all over, and then you realize you are holding your very own set of wallaby testicles. That’s how it happens.
If you were wondering what kangaroo wallaby testicles look like, well, they’re rather extraordinary.
Fun fact: koalas sleep 16-20 hours a day. If they’re asleep they don’t care what you do, and if they’re awake they’re far more concerned with munching on leaves than with how psyched you are to touch them.
what jet lag? KOALA
Like many small animal parks, you could buy treats to feed the animals. These were in the form of ice cream cones filled with alfalfa and food pellets. The brilliant part of this, for me, was that families would buy six of these for their kids who would then spill the food and drop broken cones in in cages where the animals were too well fed to care. This meant that I could then come along and scavenge armfuls of cones to feed various animals that most of the patrons ignored.
too full to care
Once I figured this out and we had already seen most of the park, I had a never-ending source of entertainment! Most people wanted to feed the warm and fuzzy and adorable wallabies that freely wandered the park with the people and the peacocks and the pigeons and the egrets and the ibises. Given the ratio of small children with generous parents to wallabies, the wallabies did not particularly want more food, being well stuffed and content to loll in the sun. They did, however, appreciate a good scratch.
they’re soft. really really really soft.
(Sidenote: the male that was attempting to mount a female already with joey did not appreciate me offering his intended a good scratch)
push off, yank
At one point I spent ten minutes with a rock wallaby which really seemed to appreciate my pets. (The rock wallabies were in their own sealed enclosure with holes in the fence just large enough to stick a hand through.
The animals that were most fascinating to feed were the birds and other critters mostly ignored by patrons. The park housed two emus in an enclosure with several red kangaroos who, like the wallabies, were more interested in sunning than begging. The emus on the other hand wanted food BADLY. The problem was that most people are somewhat intimidated by a five foot tall bird, and while they all wanted their pictures taken with one, they were wary of feeding them. Let’s just say I made two very good friends who didn’t mind me stroking their necks or scratching their large feathered bodies.
kinda like cookie monster
The cassowaries were also interesting to feed. I was quite timid at first, having heard much of how dangerous they are, but the thing about metal fences is they can’t kick you through them, and they loved being fed bits of cone through the fence.
We know we kick people to death, but really we just want some ice cream cone…
The park also contains several hundred parrots, cockatoos, cockatiels, parakeets, lorikeets, and on and on. It was interesting to try feeding different species and different birds within a species bits of food pellet and cone. Some were much more interested than others, some were much more dextrous than others, and some were much more intelligent than others. The red tailed black cockatoos were the most interesting and varied in how they ate the bits of cone. Some would bite with their beak and lets most of it drop to the ground, most would grasp it with one foot while taking small bites with their beaks, but one, oh, one! This cockatoo at first seemed to be having trouble eating the cone at all, as it took two pieces from my fingers and dropped them to the ground. But after I stopped giving it pieces, it worked its way to the ground by beak and claw, whereupon it picked a piece of cone up and walked over to its pool of water. It dunked the cone in the water and then ate small bites. Sometimes it would re-dunk a piece if it wasn’t wet enough. It repeated the process with each piece of cone I gave it. After this discovery I gave pieces of cone to every ret tailed black cockatoo I could find, but none used this particular method of consumption. Cool bird.
There was also another red tailed black cockatoo that I’m fairly convinced fell deeply in love with Ben, but I’ll let him tell that story.
The Tawny Frogmouth is an amazing and hilarious looking bird that fluffs its feathers such that it looks like a really cranky peace of rock. I kind of want one.
Kookaburras look like large fluffy kingfishers and cackle like packs of orangutans. Truly.
After four hours of watching, peering, feeding, petting, scratching, feeling, and walking, we were picked up, packed partly catatonic into the car, transported home whereupon we left for dinner at a “rather nice pub” called the Windsor. Worry not, there were no zombies.
It was a WEIRD pub experience. Nice atmosphere, but very odd service. You sat yourself, got your own menus, went up to the register to order, picked up your own food when your buzzer went off, and bought your drinks at the bar. The food was tasty but unremarkable. Lots of meat. I asked Viive if there were usually vegetarian options at restaurants and she said, yeah, I mean, there are salads. Oh well. We might be eating more meat here when we go out.
After returning home and fighting to stay awake during the car ride we lay down in our cold room under lovely covers on a mattress with a heating pad under the sheet. And this was not just ANY heating pad, this is a SPLIT SIDE heating pad! I cranked my side up to a three, Ben left his side off, and we slept like the dead from 8pm-7am.
This is how we felt.
ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Summary: after traveling for 27 hours, young couple reaches new country, pets animals, and manages to stay awake until a somewhat reasonable hour. Go young couple!
