We’ve been very busy bees the last few weeks. Work has been going great for both of us and we’ve really settled into city living. We’ve moved apartment in the last few weeks. Found a lovely 2 bed apartment, just a couple of hundred yards away from our old place. It’s right on Hyde Park. We now have a gorgeous view of St. Mary’s Cathedral and Hyde Park, with Sydney Harbour in the background. We still have our gym and swimming pool in the building, so we’re still keeping our high living standards, nothing but the best for us! Haha We [View Full Entry]

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Back again! So we’re finally both working full time and really enjoying Sydney. It’s never boring even when it rains and so far Autumn is nicer than an Irish summer! We really turn into tourists at the weekend and our latest escapades have been lots of fun!! There was the Easter Show a couple of weekends back which is a huge festival held each year in Sydney Olympic Park. The park is very impressive and it was great to see that it is still used every week and didn’t just go to waste once the Olympics were over. There’s a few [View Full Entry]

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That's right, New Shoes! The main reason for me getting a job (it's handy when it comes to paying the rent as well i suppose) was that Sydney has the BEST shoe shops I have ever seen. And I was in need of a serious shoe-fix haha. So yes that's right, i've got myself a brill job working in the clinical research dept in a medical device company, sure the experience will be useful but mostly the money is great so I can buy new shoes! 4 pairs so far since I started work 3 weeks ago and I have my [View Full Entry]

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We thought with all the doom and gloom at home and the “R*****n” getting everyone down, it would be nice to cheer you all up a bit. So, being the nice people that we are, we have got some pictures of our apartment to show you. Now try not to be too jealous, we haven’t included any pictures of the mini cinema or 25m swimming pool or the gym, just a few snaps of the apartment, oh and the awesome view of course. And the best thing about it is we have lots of time to enjoy it because neither of [View Full Entry]

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So here we are, the major stopover on our voyage, Sydney. We have been here for almost four weeks now and we are really loving it!! It is a really cool city and the weather has been just prefect for us, mid 20’s most days. Even on the other side of the world and having a ball, we too have felt the far reaching affects of the financial crisis, with my job in ICON falling through. Basically there is a recruitment freeze worldwide and unfortunately for me, that includes people who were already offered a job!!!! But don’t worry, we’ll be [View Full Entry]

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Melbourne hmmmm. It was a mixed bag to say the least. We arrived into Melbourne at 5 in the evening, foolishly thinking that the hottest part of the day was around midday, only to discover that the hottest part of the day during a heat wave tends to be dinner time - woohoo - let’s bake J Walking out of the lovely air conditioned airport into the evening sun felt similar to walking into a very hot sauna (fully clothed and carrying rucksacks). Once we arrived at our hostel we were very happy to have booked a nice double room all [View Full Entry]

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How better to kick off our stay in Christchurch, than a hot air balloon ride watching the sun rise! Rising at 4am (that’s right, 4 o’clock in the morning!) we were picked up outside our hostel and brought to a field outside the city, stopping to pick up our pilot on the way. Still pitch dark when we got to our take off point, we had to dig in and help set the balloon up. After lifting the basket off the trailer, we then had to drag the balloon itself out of its huge bag. It took 5 of us dragging [View Full Entry]

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Dunedin on a quiet Sunday afternoon, it was exactly what we needed after a fun-filled visit to Queenstown. We stayed in a gorgeous hostel which was a converted private hospital and was over 100 years old. Our room was huge, about 25x25 feet and we even had our own antique fireplace as a headboard. It also had a ghost which, we were as much warned as informed, appeared occasionally to guests during the twilight hours. Luckily we escaped without making her acquaintance. I’m fairly certain I would have had a minor heart attack if I had seen her. The city was [View Full Entry]

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The weather on the drive out of Milford was just as miserable as the drive in. The numerous waterfalls again making up for the heavy rainfall. The next stop was Queenstown, adventure capital of New Zealand. Queenstown sits right on Lake Wakatipu and has the aptly named “The Remarkables” mountains overlooking the area. They truly are remarkable, their jagged landscape making them unique in New Zealand, which being a volcanic country sitting on 2 tectonic plates has mountains by the dozen! We arrived in Queenstown welcomed by lovely beaming sunshine, quite the contrast to the dism [View Full Entry]

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So we had read about Milford Sound and the huge amount of rainfall it receives. After all, it is a rain forest! We figured we’d been getting more than our fair share of fabulous weather so the day we chose to go to Milford it would of course be raining. We set off early, around 8.30am (Hey that is early for us ok?!) from our base in Te Anau where we had spent two days relaxing by the lake and eating Chinese take-away. We knew within half an hour of driving the Milford Road (the only road in and out of [View Full Entry]

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