Someone was relieved.

The final viewing:

It’s an independent flat, located in Greystanes (great name, eh?). The pictures were beautiful on the ad – stylish modern furnishings, lovely construction. Somehow we managed to miss the fact that it didn’t come with a bed.

Anyway, it took us a good hour to bus/train/bus there from Viive and Ian’s place. We walked down a lovely street with lovely houses and lovely yards. We found the house where we were supposed to meet the realtor… but no one was there. We occupied ourselves by peering in the windows and examining the landscaping. It’s been worked on a lot, and looked freshly redone. Nice driveway, nice siding… quite nice looking even on this grey windy day.

The owner of the house eventually let us in to the back area – apparently he was working in the back yard while we were snooping, and the realtor had called him to let us in.

The back patio of the main house was kind of incredible.  A large covered area with dining settings and a flat screen TV mounted on the outside of what we discovered was the flat we were going to look at. There was an ashtray on the patio set. And small children’s toys in the walkway.

The little flat itself was fairly nice, as shown in the pictures, but as I mentioned, no bed. And it was one room, plenty of room for the modern kitchen and the sitting area, but the only logical spot for a bed to go… was opposite the large sliding glass doors that faced the main house’s entertainment area. Right next to the flat screen tv.

Bed next to glass doors and late night entertainment plus bed next to glass doors where small children play = well. Not my ideal. Plus, they smoke.

I think the disappointment of the lack of privacy along with the reality of just how long my commute would be swung Ben solidly in the direction I wanted: right towards the lovely little granny flat we’d seen on Wednesday! Our minds were made up. We just had to wait for them to email and tell us whether it was still available.

The realtor kindly gave us a ride back to the train station, though I think she knew we weren’t interested (Ben emailed her later in the day to let her know), and we headed back home.

…

Part two, in which Adrienne discovered Nirvana.

With half the day left, we decided to finally head further into Sydney! We’ve been here 5 days and we haven’t set foot in Sydney proper. Lame.

The day, hinted at earlier in Greystanes with the breeze and cool drizzle, got a bit more rambunctious. I hadn’t thought of Sydney as cold, but coming straight out of Michigan summer meant I was doing an interesting shuffle-hustle to try and work some heat into my core after we disembarked the train. Ben and I both quickly concluded that we’d be happy spending our first few hours in Sydney inside, somewhere warm, preferably with a hot drink to keep us company.

First we found lunch, at an interesting looking Thai place (THAI!) where we both ordered medium spicy and had our mouths melt out of our heads. The key, we found, to a few moments of relief was to hold a mouthful of water for as long as you care to, and only when you swallow will your tongue continue to smolder. Ben got a basil chili noodle dish. I got a salad. A beef salad. Which was amazing and perfectly textured with hard little slabs of cured (?) beef in an awesomesauce sauce.

On our next jaunt, refueled, we encountered The Chocolate Room, and I could only follow as Ben made a beeline for a hot stack of chocolate pancakes, or a chocolate sampling plate, or a pot of Italian hot chocolate, or… I asked him to get me a mocha, and had a seat, breathing into my hands to warm them. He reappeared with…

How can you argue with that? I got my mocha (yummy) plus half of this monstrosity, which I discovered was a giant cream puff covered in chocolate mousse.

We spent the afternoon sipping and reading/writing/being warm. It was great!

Once we decided to break cover we headed further downtown, and that’s when I found it… Victoria’s Basement. I know where my home is now.

Victoria’s Basement is kind of like the small kitchen section of Tj Maxx blown into even more awesome.

We got a large cutting board, in anticipation of our hopefully new awesome granny flat. And two bowls, of interesting design, that called to me.

One of the things that I was saddest to leave behind in storage in the US was a set of two large cutting boards that Ben’s dad made for us out of an old table which was in turn made out of butcher block material. Those things were fantastic, and lived permanently on our counters so that we and whatever sous chefs were visiting could all chop together in harmony.

We didn’t find a replacement, but we did find a large stand-in made out of rubber wood that will suffice until we can return to our true love cutting boards. This cutting board, along with my wonderful knives that we brought with us, will make wherever we are home.

I was forced to leave Nirvana because it was closing, which is lucky for Ben, because I might have bitten his fingers off as he tried to drag me out to go get food or something.

…

Our future landlords emailed!

“We were due to have our final person though to look at the place tonight, however they have cancelled. No problem however, as B and I thought you and Adrienne were great and I would like to now officially offer our Granny Flat to you two.

Feel free to move in over the weekend at your convenience, we will drop the fridge, kitchen utensils and anything else we can find into the flat that may be of use to you.”

Did I mention they’re letting us use a dorm fridge and some pots, pans, and dishes? Did I mention that I love this place, and the landlords that come with us? I’d go “EEEEEEEE!” right now, but it’s late, and I don’t want to wake anyone up.

These are the pictures from the ad for the flat:

“eeee!”

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.

Snails! In a tree!

We’ve lathered up with sunscreen twice today!

…

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.

Better luck tomorrow?