Christmas on Bondi Beach

It’s been a pretty eventful couple of months. I have handed in my notice at RMAP, and it is probably a surprise to nobody that we are moving back to the UK!!

We are not there yet, but at this point, it looks like there isn’t a job for me back in Scotland (only Oxford) and as the whole point of moving back home is to be with friends and family… ending up 400 miles south isn’t what we had in mind.

Anyway, it seems that there will be enough interesting stuff happening to do some more blogging again (unlike back in Dullsville Perth), so it’s time to kick off the blog again.

We landed in Sydney yesterday (xmas eve) and are now prepping up for Hogmanay out on the Harbour. This is real bucket list country – yesterday we wandered down to the harbour to see the iconic bridge, and of course, the sydney opera house. The feeling of standing beside such an iconic, recognised the world over building was something else – almost as big a rush as seeing the pyramids.

A magical evening of cocktails sitting in the elegant bar, as some guy played christmas music on the piano, and a nice long lie.

We hit the gym for an epic session (not bob), got ready and headed out – Sydney’s public transport was largely running, and the train out to Bondi Junction was reasonably busy – then the buses (standing room only) out to Bondi Beach.

So… it’s basically like Irvine, or burntisland. Very much like burntisland, in fact, with the same fine white sand. And the way people are huddled around windbreaks trying to keep warm. In the rain.

As with many of our experiences of Australia, the weather has played a large part in making it entirely average. You can see even more so here than usual that the tourism people here earn their money ten times over by carefully picking which footage is used in advertising.

Anyhoo, the rain is likely to last until Thursday, so we may have a single good day out of our eight day holiday to enjoy the beach.

At the moment, we are sitting relaxing in our gorgeous hotel room waiting to head down for dinner – which will hopefully be rather nice, especialy after the “bondi burger experience” of lunch. shudder.

Life begins at Forty…

Forty degrees, that is.

It’s been hot the last few days – and the aussies have been doing the whole ‘hot enough for ya?’ thing. I guess we are supposed to be dripping with sweat and miserable, not basking in the sun like lizards.

ah well.

You want to know how hot 40 is? it’s this hot:

forty

The main thing is to enjoy the heat, but also to cool off when it starts to get a bit sticky.. so, time to get the pool cleaned. nothing like a bit of manual labour to get you cooled down.

Well, it is when you clean the pool the way I do:

A perfect day..

So yesterday was a bit wet and miserable. The weather is a bit of a focus for us at the moment, as it is unbelievably cold at nights. My boss Rudy reckoned that this would be one of the coldest winters we had ever experienced… and coming from Scotland I had a good old laugh.

oh boy was he right.

The problem is that Australian houses are built to get rid of heat in the summer. They have white painted walls, tiled surfaces, overhanging roofs to shade the windows.. and not a stick of insulation.

Houses built in the last few years are starting to get (some) insulation – nobody has double glazing, as it’s only needed for sound proofing.. and folks get around it in the winter months by blasting on the gas fires, electric heaters and wood stoves.

I guess the whole idea of building a passive insulated house with decent thermal management to keep the heat in during winter and keep the cold air in during summer will start to kick in as fuel prices continue to rise.. but for this year, in our rented house…

brrr.

We have a couple of DeLonghi dragon electric heaters to keep the bedroom warm, but it’s like being back at our crappy flat in Motherwell. All of the folks we speak to have a little chortle, and say something along the lines of ‘wait till summer…’

That being said – today has been delicious. we nipped out to the local IGA (independent growers of australia – like Spar) to grab some bacon and rolls.. had a delicious breakfast sitting out on the deck… pottered around the house doing some weeding, put the pool cover back on (we had to leave it off for a couple of days, as the chlorine was a bit high), and settled down a lazy afternoon in the hot tub.

Nothing quite like a soak in the hot tub, couple of bottles of cider and just putting the world’s wrongs to right.. the suns just at that lovely ‘last light of the day’ stage just now – everything’s golden orange and yellow.. in fact, here’s a quick photo of the view from my desk – this is looking towards the edge of Joondalup.

So, settling down to read a book and generally chill before dinner. It’s days like this that just make you hapy to be alive 🙂

Nothing for days, then three posts wrapped into one!

Well, it’s been a few days since any blogging, you’d think we had given up, but no!

It’s been a bloody busy few days, with no internet connection…. which has been hard, trust me!

We have finally moved into our own place and out of the rented accommodation. The “holiday” accommodation was fine, but we couldn’t settle at all knowing we were in someone’s basement – one time the owner came down while I was on the loo! He knocked and everything, but still – it was his basement….

Now, we are in our own place (well, still rented, so we can’t knock holes in the walls even when Ian’s SDS drill arrives) and it has made all the difference. We have created a wee walk through for you, but we can’t actually post it yet – it’s another 2 weeks till we get real net access – we are working off my new ozzie mobile phone at the moment. Once we are up for real, we will show you the place from the front door all the way through 🙂 We already have the movie, we just don’t have the bandwidth to upload it.

The last few days gave been hectic – Ian has been at work this week (since Tuesday, as Monday was a holiday – they don’t do the previous Monday that most of the UK does) – and we picked up this place on Thursday, so the past few days for me have been about running around getting stuff we need. Then Thursday Ian bunked off for an hour or so to sign off here ( with me not having a job yet, waster that I am, the car loan, my phone and the house are all in Ian’s name, w00t 😉 ) Then it was all day Friday I was waiting on stuff being delivered – washing machine, fridge, giant mega bed, all important PCs from Scotland, temporary desks for the PCs and basic IKEA sofa and dining table.

With having none of our stuff yet – last time we checked it hadn’t actually left the UK, even though we were told it would be leaving shortly after us – we have set up camp in the computer room. Basically we are rattling round a HUGE empty house right now. Once our stuff arrives it will be very different, but for now, it’s settling in one room.

Today (Saturday) was a day of shopping – we were being very Fight Club (“a house full of condiments and no food”) so we finally got a load of food, and then on to IKEA for the “reasonably decent, but not as good as our own, solutions for modern living” PC chairs and other stuff. If you didn’t realise that a 207CC has may areas that live within Time And Relative Dimensions In Space (that’s a TARDIS for those that didn’t watch Dr Who as a kid (or maybe even now) ) I can’t believe how much we managed to fit in it …. We have also ordered our very own barbeque – 4 burner plus gas ring in black for our deck. It will arrive on Tuesday.

I did have a “moment” tonight though … I was having a great time, cooking for real for the first time in almost a month, with a glass of wine and I was very much enjoying it, when I thought, “we should have a house warming” and then I cried a bit 🙁 Its not the first “moment”, but it wasn’t great ….

Gonna sign off this blog post with many congrats to Gerry and Steven on the new baby Finn!

Yeah, nice one T-mobile!

just a quickie before we head off to the bank – we both have HTC smart phones, windows mobile things with touch screens, pop out keyboards etc. We got them from T-mobile branded as “Vario II” – they are also called “Tytn” or “hermes”, depending on who is selling them.

so, popped my new SIM into the phone, only to be faced with a Network Lock – unsurprisingly, t-mobile had locked the phones to them: not much use to me, as t-mobile don’t have an australian network (vodafone and three are the only guys from the UK out here).

quick call* to the UK later, and T-mobile want £20 and 28 days to send out the unlock code for the phone. each.

Thankfully, the magic internet comes to the rescue again – this guy has an unlocker that removes all of the network locks easily – for the princely sum of zero, taking about 8 minutes. I’ll probably chuck him a tenner donation…

I’m on three now – they seem to have good enough coverage, but I need to get the mobile internet working to see how it is.. especially as our computer kit has cleared customs, and should be delivered to the house next friday.

from here, it’s just get a phone, get broadband, set up the servers and then we should have proper email etc back.
I am, of course, trying to stop myself from jumping around the place with excitement (and not just because of who got booted on the apprentice last night!). We pick up the new car tomorrow 😀

Been a couple of days ….

Been a couple of days since we updated anything….

My nephew has teeth! Go Adam. Well done wee man!

Elaine, I havent found me a job yet never mind you and BJ, that will take a few weeks I am afraid, we only just got here! Besides, I am sure mum & dad will be annoyed if we all ended up here – the reason for having 4 kids was to have them spread out over the world, not all in Oz.

Di, has Jennifer got any word on her visa?

And just so he doesnt feel left out, as I am sure he hasnt seen this at all yet – Rab, ya smelly bas!

We BBQed burgers today for lunch, and then again for dinner – because it looks like Perth closes down on a Sunday. There are some restaurants open, but very few – we fancied sushi, but there arent that many open, and none of the open ones have a conveyor belt. We wanted a sushi train!

Today we explored, we saw Freemantle, which was nice, Rockingham, which doesnt really Rock at all – its industrial city with BOC plants and so on. We also went into Kings Park in the centre of Perth which is beautiful! Then we went north to check out stuff near our new house in Joondalup, and went to the nearest beach:

This is litteraly 5 minutes by car from the door. It was amazingly fab, right onto the Indian Ocean. Huge breakers, sandy beach, people surfing, kayacking, and the best bit was that it wasnt too busy.

We still have a fair bit to get sorted, tomorrow they will check the finance for the car and let us know, the house is already sorted, we have applied for our Tax numbers, so we can both work OK. We need to arrange insurance and get a bed for arriving in the house.

Its the only way to fly …

I have to say, I love Singapore Airlines.
The A380 is amazing, and the service is unbeleivably good, even in economy. You cant call this cattle class!

We had a smooth boarding process, hot towels before take off. Free drinks, more free drinks (we like the Singapore Sling) both with peanuts. A tasty meal, loads of leg room, could always be doing with more obviously, but it wasnt cramped enough to worry about, even for me.

They came round with snacks later on, and repeatedly were there with water to keep you hydrated.

The entertainment system is AMAZING. I watched Dr Who, House, Bones, se7en, Pushing Daisies, Sarah Connor Chronicles, and loads of other stuff. The CD selection was great, even if it did have loads more pop and R&B than rock – still plenty for me.

Then the lights dim, but I couldnt sleep, not quite enough room for that for me, though most other people on the flight did seem to.

The lights gently faded up around two and a half hours before landing… where there were more hot towels, then breakfast!

We wandered a little aimlessly through Singapore Airport, not entirely sure where we were meant to be, through arrivals (filling out the admissions card just before passport control) then towards “Coach” as we had been promised “in coach transfer”, and found the SIA Stopovers desk. 10 minutes later a mini bus arrived for us, and we were whisked off to the Ritz Carlton.

Singapore is beautiful. Clean, tree lined streets. Warm and sunny. And the staff at the hotel were amazingly helpful. We were walked to the reception and given ice cold towels and some mango juice while we were checking in. Escorted to our room and shown round. When Ian wandered off to get some ice for the ice bucket a member of staff who happened to be in the corridor spotted him, ran towards him to find out what he needed, saw the ice bucket and apologized that the ice machine on this level is broken, took the bucket from him and got us ice from another level and brought it to our room.

We are soooooo coming back to Singapore!